As Anthropic’s valuation as a company grows so do the number of copyright lawsuits against it.
Today, Thomas William Shakespeare from London, along with 99 other authors, sued Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann in the Northern District of California.
This is the tenth copyright suit against Anthropic. And it is the 118th lawsuit against AI companies in the United States.
Shakespeare’s theory of the case is based on the Bartz v. Anthropic decision, which framed Anthropic’s initial torrenting of unlicensed works from online libraries for a central library as a separate use from Anthropic’s later training of its model.
Shakespeare’s complaint focuses on this initial torrenting and putative library building, while suggesting in passing that the training would not be fair use (contra the decision in Bartz).
Excerpt:
DOWNLOAD THE COMPLAINT