Public notebook

Per work

Declaration of interest: Anthropic, the defendant in this case, develops the artificial intelligence assistant with which I work on this notebook.

On 20 July 2026, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval to the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement: a fund of $1.5 billion, plus accrued interest, for the holders of specific books that Anthropic had downloaded from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The order calls it an exceptional recovery; authors' organisations and specialists describe it as the largest financial settlement known in US copyright litigation.

Approval does not equate to a conviction or an admission of liability by Anthropic. It is court approval of a class settlement: the judge verified that the agreement was fair, reasonable, and adequate for the affected class in accordance with Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

The official settlement website indicates that the effective date has passed, provided no appeal filed out of time succeeds. The first round of payments is scheduled for 15 November 2026 or earlier. It will only include works without pending disputes between claimants and whose holders have provided all necessary data for payment. Money corresponding to other titles will remain in the escrow account for subsequent distributions.

The fund is not disbursed at once. Anthropic must complete several payments, and the final contribution of $450 million plus interest is due in September 2027. For this reason, there is not yet a single final figure per book.

Who made it onto the list

The class does not include all authors whose books were found in those libraries. It comprises the legal holders or beneficiaries of 482,460 works included in a closed list. Each work had to meet, among other conditions, these three:

Originating from Library Genesis or Pirate Library Mirror within the datasets identified in the litigation.
Possessing an ISBN or an ASIN.
Having been registered with the United States Copyright Office within five years of its first publication.

Registration did not necessarily have to be performed by the author. It could be the responsibility of the publisher or another holder. However, if the work did not meet the registration requirement or did not appear on the list, it remained outside the settlement even if Anthropic had obtained a copy from a pirate library. Claims relating to excluded works were not extinguished by this agreement.

As at 16 April 2026, 440,490 of the 482,460 works on the list had been claimed: 91.3%. It is the only claims rate the approval order reports. There were 350 valid exclusions affecting 1,802 works, about 0.37% of the list.

What the court had already decided

Before the settlement, Judge William Alsup separated two issues that are often confused. He considered the use of books to train models to be fair use, as well as the conversion of legally acquired printed copies into digital copies intended for an internal library. Conversely, he did not protect as fair use the downloading and storage of millions of copies from pirate libraries to form a central library, even if some could be used later in training.

The settlement resolves the class claims linked to that acquisition and storage of copies obtained from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. It did not make piracy lawful nor did it establish that any training with protected works constitutes fair use. The previous decision referred to the facts and the record of this case, originates from a federal district court, and does not by itself create a general rule binding on all artificial intelligence litigation.

What it pays and what it leaves open

The agreement compensates for a defined set of past acts: the acquisition and copying by Anthropic of the works included in the list up to 25 August 2025. It also mandates the destruction of files downloaded from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror and any derivative copies it retains, subject to the technical exceptions provided for in the agreement.

The release of claims is narrow. It does not extend to:

Works not appearing on the list.
Claims based on model outputs.
Anthropic's conduct since 25 August 2025.
Claims of those who validly excluded themselves from the settlement.

The distribution is calculated per work, not per author or per downloaded copy. Each recognised title receives the same basic share, regardless of its sales, length, or cost of creation. If multiple holders exist for a work, they must divide that share. Disagreements may be submitted to the allocation procedure and, where appropriate, to the special master appointed to resolve them.

Initial estimates placed the gross compensation at approximately $3,000 per work. This is not a guaranteed amount. Court-approved expenses are deducted from the fund, and the net amount depends, among other factors, on the final number of valid claims, interest, administrative costs, and subsequent distributions.

The judge set class counsel’s fees at $101,561,111, approximately 6.77% of the fund, compared with the $187.5 million finally requested. She also awarded reimbursement of $2,635,197.46 in litigation expenses, out of $2,975,197.46 requested, disallowing $340,000 contributed by non-appointed counsel to the litigation fund. Separately, she approved a reserve of $18.22 million for anticipated costs of administering and finalising the settlement, which may be used only with prior court approval. She also set $15,000 for each of the three class representatives, rather than the $50,000 requested.

A price per act

What follows is my own interpretation.

A class action settlement may assign a price when it succeeds in converting a disputed harm into a manageable list: identified works, verifiable registrations, locatable rights holders, and acts bounded in time. Here, the unit of distribution is not the creative work nor every possible use of a work. It is the title that meets specific legal and documentary criteria.

Such precision makes payment possible and reveals its limit. Excluded are works without the required registration, those not appearing on the list, other types of creation, and controversies regarding model outputs. The agreement does not state what a book is worth. It states what is due, within a specific transaction, for settling specific claims regarding specific copies.

For those who create outside of books registered in the United States, the lesson is less a tariff than an architecture: reparation depends on whether the harm can be proven, grouped, and linked to a rights holder. What does not fit into that structure may retain its claim intact while, at the same time, remaining without an equivalent practical avenue for enforcement.

About the open conversation

This text continues the Notebook's line of inquiry regarding authorship, training data, and reparation. It is advisable to read the case in that sequence: first, the provenance of the copies; then, the use to which they were put; finally, which claims are closed and which remain open. Confusing these levels turns a settlement concerning a pirate library into a universal answer regarding model training, something that neither the prior ruling nor the agreement allows one to assert.

Individual amounts remain subject to valid claims, the apportionment between co-owners, authorised expenses, and subsequent distributions. If you work in copyright or collective management and can provide a documented correction, write to me.

Sources

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