As you may have heard or read in the news, Judge William Alsup ruled that Bartz v. Anthropic, a class action case against the AI company Anthropic can move forward.
If you believe your copyrighted work has been unlawfully downloaded by Anthropic, you have the opportunity to submit information to the plaintiffs’ attorneys in Bartz v. Anthropic, one of the copyright class action lawsuits involving AI.
The court found that Anthropic infringed authors’ and publishers’ copyrights by downloading millions of books from the pirate websites Library Genesis (“LibGen”) and Pirate Library Mirror (“PiLiMi”) to train their AI model, and certified a class comprised of all rights holders of copyright-registered books downloaded by Anthropic from these sites.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys are collecting contact information from all authors and publishers who may be part of the class to ensure that they receive official notices in the case going forward. By providing your contact information to the plaintiffs’ attorney’s, you’ll have the opportunity to opt out of the suit or to stay in the suit to receive your share of the award if the plaintiffs prevail. The attorneys have created a website where rights holders can confidentially provide this information.
How do I know if I’m part of the class action? What do I need to do?
To be eligible for the class action, your copyrighted books must have been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, have an ISBN or ASIN, and have been downloaded by Anthropic from pirate libraries LibGen (June 2021) and PiLiMi (July 2022).
Unfortunately, we’re unable to determine for you if your titles were unlawfully downloaded by Anthropic. If you suspect your books may have been unlawfully downloaded by Anthropic, we encourage you to visit the plaintiff attorneys’ website to provide the requested information. This is an important step in ensuring that as many authors as possible are compensated for the unauthorized use of their work to train AI.
If you have questions about how class action lawsuits work, we recommend reading the following resource from The Authors Guild: Class Action Lawsuits: An Overview for Authors.