Judge certifies class against Anthropic for copyright infringement

A federal judge in San Francisco certified a class action against Anthropic PBC on Thursday brought by authors accusing the company of copyright infringement three weeks after the court found Anthropic illegally pirated 7 million books online to train its AI assistant Claude.

The plaintiffs sued Anthropic over claims that the "cutting edge" AI virtual assistant is built on "widespread" copyright infringement and pirating of written works from across the internet for purposes of training the large language model behind Claude. Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, 3:24-cv-05417 (N.D. Cal. filed Aug. 19, 2024).

In June, U.S. District Judge William Alsup partially denied Anthropic's motion for summary judgment on its fair use defense, which argued that the company's use of both purchased and downloaded materials was transformative. Alsup found that Anthropic in fact pirated 7 million copies of copyrighted materials, including some of the plaintiffs' works.

In his order Thursday, Alsup built on his previous findings. He ruled that the case "exemplifies the classic litigation that should be certified as a representative action, for the entire class stands aggrieved by defendant's downloading of their books from pirate libraries on the internet. It will be straightforward to prove the class-wide wrong done."

Alsup also appointed Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP and Susman Godfrey LLP as lead class counsel in the case. Trial is set for Dec. 1.

Douglas Winthrop, a San Francisco partner for Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP and one of Anthropic's lead attorneys, argued in its opposition brief that, a class action, if granted, "deprives Anthropic of the ability to obtain discovery about individualized issues and to test individualized flaws in those claims. And it would require countless individuals and entities from across the globe to have their claims lumped together and potentially adjudicated without any knowledge that they were part of the class."

Rachel Geman, a New York partner for Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein and one of the lead attorneys for the authors, on the other hand, argued that a class action is "the superior method of adjudication" because damages recovered under the Copyright Act from her client's individualized claims would be insufficient.

"Few if any Class members could afford on their own to bring an expensive copyright case against a well-funded artificial intelligence company with extensive litigation resources, especially when compared to the available damages for any one copyright owner. While not insignificant, the damages available under the Copyright Act are insufficient to compensate the average rights holder for the time and cost required to bring an action against a multi-billion-dollar corporation."

Anthropic's media relations office and its attorneys could not be reached for comment. The plaintiffs' attorneys declined to comment.

Douglas Winthrop, a San Francisco partner for Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP and one of Anthropic's lead attorneys, argued in an opposition brief that the plaintiffs should pursue individual claims instead of a class action because the statutory damages provision in the Copyright Act "is designed to give litigation value to each individual case."

Geman argued in the motion for class certification that this is "an open and shut case of largescale copyright infringement."

"For the last several years, Anthropic has needed massive quantities of books to train its large language models," the motion stated. "Instead of buying these books and getting a license to copy them, Anthropic sought out pirated copies from the dark corners of the internet."

In Thursday's order, Alsup declined to certify a separate subclass of authors accusing Anthropic of appropriating their works from The Books3 dataset, a large collection of over 190,000 digitized books commonly used for training language models. Books3's material is sourced from the public domain, libraries and other online repositories.

Anthropic asked Alsup to reconsider his ruling on the summary judgment order on the pirated materials in a motion filed July 14. The motion is awaiting a response from the plaintiffs.

The following attorneys also represent Anthropic: Joseph Farris, Jessica Lim Gillotte, Angel T. Nakamura of Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP; Joseph Wetzel, Andrew M. Gass of Latham & Watkins LLP; and Mark Lemley of Lex Lumina LLP.

The following attorneys also represent the plaintiffs: Rohit D. Nath, Justin A. Nelson, Alejandra C. Salinas, Jordan W. Connors, J. Craig Smyser, and Collin Fredricks of Susman Godfrey LLP; Jacob S. Miller, Danna Z. Elmasry, Daniel M. Hutchinson and Reilly T. Stoler of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP; Scott J. Sholder and CeCe M. Cole of Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP.