Victoria D. Rengel, The Harvard Crimson; Harvard Professors May Be Eligible for Payments in $1.5 Billion AI Copyright Settlement
"Following mediation, the plaintiffs and defendants filed a motion for the preliminary approval of a settlement on Sept. 5, which included an agreement from Anthropic that it will destroy its pirated databases and pay $1.5 billion in damages to a group of authors and publishers.
On Sept. 25, a California federal judge granted preliminary approval for a settlement, the largest in the history of copyright cases in the U.S.
Each member of the class will receive a payment of approximately $3,000 per pirated work.
Authors whose works are in the databases are not notified separately, but instead must submit their contact information to receive a formal notice of the class action — meaning a number of authors, including many Harvard professors, may be unaware that their works were pirated by Anthropic.
Lynch said Anthropic’s nonconsensual use of her work undermines the purpose behind why she, and other scholars, write and publish their work.
“All of us at Harvard publish, but we thought when we were publishing that we are doing that — to communicate to other human beings,” she said. “Not to be fed into this mill.”"
