The judge supports humanity’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement

A US judge on Thursday approved a humanity’s contract to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a class action lawsuit to accumulate pirated libraries to train artificial intelligence.

“We are pleased that the court has granted preliminary approval of the settlement,” Aparna Sridhar, Associate General Counsel for Humanity, said in response to AFP’s question.

“This decision will allow us to focus on developing secure AI systems.”

The settlement comes from a class action lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Burtz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson.

With a partial victory for humanity, U.S. District Judge William Alsup determined in June that purchasing or training the company’s Claude AI model books in pirated copies changed the works that constituted “fair use” under the law.

“The technology in question was one of the most transformative things that many of us could see in our lifetimes,” Alsup wrote in his decision, comparing how humans learn by reading AI training.

However, Alsup rejected humanity’s bid for blanket protection and determined that the company’s practice of downloading millions of pirated copies to build a permanent digital library was not justified by fair use protection.

“As we consistently maintain, the court’s groundbreaking June, which determined that AI training constitutes transformative fair use, remains intact,” said Sridar, humanity.

“This settlement simply settles narrow claims about how certain materials were obtained.”

According to legal filings, the settlement covers around 500,000 books, translated to around $3,000 per work.

Under the contract, humanity destroys original pirated files and copies created, but the company retains the rights to books it legally purchased and scanned.

“This settlement has serious consequences of sending a strong message to the AI ​​industry and pirated the author’s work to train AI, and taking away those who can’t afford it,” author’s Guild CEO Mary Raysenberger said in a statement in support of the deal.

San Francisco-based humanity announced in early September that it had raised $13 billion in a funding round valued the AI ​​startup at $183 billion.

Humanity is providing generative artificial intelligence from Google, Openai, Meta and Microsoft, and creating greedy needs for data such as books that train models, attract billions of dollars in investment.

©2025 AFP