AI IS STILL HOOVERING UP BOOKS

 

Anthropic can finally start cutting checks to a group of authors and book publishers that sued the AI lab over copyright infringement. A federal judge gave final approval ... of Anthropic's landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit, Reuters reported.

The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them. While the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law, many authors and creators still don't view it as a win.

That's because of how the legal question was resolved. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the core issue. He ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as fair use — a decision widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry. But the ruling didn't excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place. Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (fine), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms and said that piracy question could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and whatever damages a jury might have awarded.

While the final approval closes out this case, it doesn't settle the legal question industrywide because Alsup's ruling was a single district court decision, and Anthropic's decision to settle means the case will never reach an appeals court to become binding precedent.

Other judges are still free to reach their own conclusions on their own facts, which is exactly what's playing out elsewhere. There is still a string of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI over whether it's legal to train AI models on copyrighted works.

To read the complete article, see:
Anthropic's landmark $1.5B copyright settlement is approved (https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/anthropics-landmark-1-5b-copyright-settlement-is-approved/)

As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. 

"The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf," ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is "the world's largest book database," and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. "Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.

To read the complete article (subscription required), see:
AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop (https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/)

From Galway to Berlin and beyond, independent booksellers across Europe agree that something very strange is going on.

Last May Tomès Kenny of famous Galway book retailer Kennys received what he describes as a "bananas" online order for 5,000 books. But it was less the scale of the order that caught his eye and more its eclectic selection.

"Some was high-quality non-fiction, like A History of Connemara, and the next thing might be The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA," said Kenny.

Large orders are nothing new for the kennys.ie website. It was only the second bookshop in the world to launch a website in 1994 and it is popular with large institutions, such as Asian universities seeking to stock shelves in newly opened English libraries.

But when publicly funded institutions contact him, they usually negotiate a bulk price. May's online order – with no haggling – sent up a second red flag.

Booksellers say it is not unusual for these orders to range from €10,000-€50,000, welcome income amid an ongoing earthquake in their industry thanks to Amazon and other online booksellers. Yet many fear that, with these bulk orders, they may be signing their own death warrant.

What is happening and its legality depends, however, on where it is happening. European booksellers say they have noticed a shift in the mass orders, away from costly shipping of titles across the Atlantic to addresses around Europe. The suspicion is that these are collection points for books, which are then shipped in bulk in containers to the US.

To read the complete article, see:
A ‘bananas' order for 5,000 obscure titles from a bookshop in Galway fuels suspicion (https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/08/10/a-mysterious-buying-spree-is-unsettling-europes-booksellers/)

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