Andrea Bartz, the lead plaintiff in the class action copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, wrote an Opinion piece in the New York Times, hailing the $1.5 billion settlement the court just approved.
Bartz attacks Big Tech companies and sends an ominous warning of book authors waging copyright wars “for years to come.”
This settlement sends a clear message to the Big Tech companies splashing generative A.I. over every app and page and program: You are not above the law.
Andrea bartz
Bartz also says she disagreed with Judge Alsup’s ruling that AI training is a fair use: “I also disagree with the judge’s ruling that, had Anthropic acquired the books legally, training its chatbot on them would have been ‘fair use.’ I write my novels to engage human minds — not to empower an algorithm to mimic my voice and spit out commodity knockoffs to compete directly against my originals in the marketplace, nor to make that algorithm’s creators unfathomably wealthy and powerful.”
Maria Pallante, the Association of American Publishers President and CEO also expressed similar disagreement with Judge Alsup’s ruling on fair use in a press release: “As it becomes clearer and clearer that one AI company after another has helped itself to the intellectual property of authors and publishers, we hope that courts will recognize that the unlicensed, carte blanche use of copyrighted works for AI training is not transformative and not fair use. Rather, it flies in the face of the Constitutional objectives of copyright law and undermines the full and safe potential of AI for all of us.”
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