Hundreds of Irish writers are set to share millions of euro following a €1.31 billion settlement of a copyright infringement case by artificial intelligence giant Anthropic.
The Irish Writers Union said the settlement, which is the first case against tech companies over the training of their large language models, will result in hundreds of authors here sharing several million euro.
The group’s disputes officer, Conor Kostick, says the sums involved are significant to many Irish authors like him and he hopes the case will lead to further legal actions against international technology giants who have used pirated works by writers without permission in order to train their generative AI models.
The case was a class action taken in 2024 by Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to which other authors could sign up. By the end of the process some 482,000 works were involved, with claims made in respect of 91 per cent of them.
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At the heart of it was the reliance by Anthropic, which owns the Claude AI models, on the LibGen online library, which provides access to millions of titles but operates outside of copyright regulations. The compensation agreed was for this use of LibGen rather than the unlicensed use of copyrighted works for training purposes which the judge suggested was covered by “fair use”, a defence that would not be available under European law.
The settlement of $1.5 billion (€1.31 billion) amounts to about $3,000 (€2,630) for each book believed to have been copied. Bestselling Irish authors such as Sally Rooney, Marian Keyes and Colm Tóibín will also be compensated but the amount is a flat rate per book and so far less important to them given their earnings.
To file a successful claim, the book has to have been registered for copyright in the United States on the date of the settlement, a provision that will result in many Irish books being excluded but Kostick believes the case is still of major significance.
“The precedent is really, really important because it has since emerged that it wasn’t just Anthropic that trained its models using pirate databases. The problem is that what you have are disputes between lots of small writers with little political influence and the huge resources of big businesses who have been cavalierly stealing copyrighted works.”
Kostick stands to receive up to about €7,500 for his three books although the judgment says the money is to be split between authors and their publishers.
Ivan O’Brien at the O’Brien Press said he expected the company to get more than €10,000 for its books covered by the settlement.
“There were probably a couple hundred of our books that were stolen as part of the Anthropic data build but we only have about a dozen in the class.
“Bloomsbury, which has a big American operation, is getting millions from the settlement but for us it’s nice rather than business amending. It’s also nice to have the principle that stealing stuff is wrong acknowledged by a court. We welcome that but really the terms of the settlement are not great from our perspective.”
Children’s author Oisín McGann said four books of his were covered and added that he was happy at the prospect of receiving up to €10,000 for works he did not expect to earn more but “unfortunately I have another 12 that were not registered for US copyright, which is not something that’s actually necessary, so unfortunately it’s four books instead of 16 and I’ll have to see how much the publishers are claiming”.
Barry Scannell, a partner at William Fry who specialises in copyright and AI, believes the case may prove to be a bad one for authors in the long term.
“It may the biggest ever settlement in relation to copyrighted material but it is also appears to bake into US law for the moment that using non-pirated books is fair use,” he said.
It has been reported that tech companies are buying up huge quantities of old second-hand books and having them scanned into their systems because of this belief that they need not pay for the copyright on them.
The copyright situation in the European Union, meanwhile, is very different but is a “disaster”, Scannell said, “both for rights holders and for people seeking to use the rights”.
Samantha Holman, chief executive of the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency, said: “The case has been a good thing. It has certainly put a focus on the fact these shadow libraries exist and maybe other companies will come to the table now, although people like Meta and Google, the big technology firms, are very good at dragging things out for a very long time.”