Anthropic is gaining on OpenAI’s in terms of most copyright lawsuits to defend.
A third group of book authors who opted out of the Bartz class settlement just sued Anthropic. Anthropic now has 9 lawsuits against it. OpenAI has 24.
The first group of Bartz opt outs, led by John Carreyrou aka Cambronne Inc., is represented by the same law firms, Stris & Maher and Freedman Normand Friedland LLP.
The second group, led by Angie Cruz, is represented by the same firms.
Now this third group, led by R.O. Kwon, is represented by the same firms.
Trial on Statutory Damages Sought
These 34 book author plaintiffs led by R.O. Kwon, 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 Kwon explain “dilution theory” aka “indirect substitution” below:
The 34 plaintiffs listed in the complaint are:
- R. O. Kwon
- Alexander Dreihann-Holenia
- Stephanie Griest
- Elizabeth Hinton
- Brian Jackson
- Jason Alan Jankovsky
- Branden W. Joseph
- Kimberly Kay Hoang
- Glenn Kreisberg
- Richard Krevolin
- Gerald Lamb
- Chang-rae Lee
- Jeannie Levinson
- Steven Lowenthal
- Mackenzie Blue LLC
- Brian Malec
- Donna Matney
- Ilona McCarty
- Tiffany McDaniel
- Brian Merchant
- Eric L. Muller
- Sonia Nazario
- Daniel José Older
- Laurence Ralph
- Lilliam Rivera
- Seth A. Roberts
- Aida Salazar
- Erika L. Sanchez
- Jeremy N. Smith
- Soul Writers, LLC
- Ramesh Srinivasan
- Robert Tannenbaum
- Kenneth Warner
- Robert Zimmerman
DOWNLOAD THE COMPLAINT IN CRUZ V. ANTHROPIC
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