On the eve of the fairness hearing for final approval of the $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthopric before Judge Martinez-Olguin, a second group of book authors who opted out of the Bartz class settlement just sued Anthropic.
(The first group led by John Carreyrou aka Cambronne Inc. is represented by the same law firms, Stris & Maher and Freedman Normand Friedland LLP.)
Trial on Statutory Damages Sought
These 28 book author plaintiffs led by Angie Cruz, author of Domicana and other books, said they are not filing a class action. They want a trial on statutory damages:
Permanent Injunction v. Anthropic Sought
The plaintiffs also seek a permanent injunction against Anthropic, which likely includes Claude models trained on the plaintiffs’ works:
Plaintiffs will likely seek injunctive relief to stop “dilution” of their works by shutting down Claude’s ability to generate non-infringing outputs in the same genre of literary works as the plaintiffs’ works.
Citing the U.S. Copyright Office’s new theory of dilution from its pre-publication report, the plaintiffs’ Complaint alleges that Claude harms their copyrights by creating non-infringing content aka “indirect substitutes” that “pose a serious risk of diluting markets for works of the same kind as in their training data.”
In the report that plaintiffs cite, the Copyright Office relied on the arguments from copyright holders that copyright should protect against harms based on the use of genres and styles “[e]ven when the output is not substantially similar to a specific underlying work,” meaning the output is non-infringing.
So-called copyright dilution is a new, controversial theory that will be tested in this lawsuit and others. Judge Alsup rejected it in Bartz v. Anthropic. Judge Chhabria endorsed it but only in dicta in Kadrey v. Meta because the plaintiffs had failed to present evidence of it beyond speculation.
The plaintiffs in Cruz explain “dilution theory” aka “indirect substitution” below:
The 28 plaintiffs listed in the complaint are:
- Angie Cruz
- Sean Arbabi
- Ascalon, LLC
- Martin Atkins
- Michael Ault
- Jacob Bernstein
- Matt Birkbeck
- Charles Blackstone
- Warren Bobrow
- Jim Campbell
- Dennis Carstens
- Kerry Chance
- Sinan Ciddi
- Brian Copeland
- Aya de Leon
- Carolina De Robertis
- Jaquira Diaz
- Dave Eggers
- John Ferejohn
- Walter Gmelch
- Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve
- Michael Goodrich
- Ron Hall
- Marla Heller
- Daniel James
- Lynn Sonberg
- Lynn Sonberg Book Associates
- Vendela Vida
DOWNLOAD THE COMPLAINT IN CRUZ V. ANTHROPIC