U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court Thursday after the two sides worked to address his concerns about the settlement, which will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 for each of the books covered by the agreement. It does not apply to future works. “This is a fair settlement,” Alsup said, though he added that distributing it to all parties will be “complicated.”
Source: Judge approves $1.5 billion settlement over AI company Anthropic’s alleged use of pirated books
Kirsty Innes, recently appointed as a special adviser to Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, said “whether or not you philosophically believe the big AI firms should compensate content creators, they in practice will never legally have to”. Innes has deleted the statement, which she posted to X in February. In the deleted posts, seen by the Guardian, she said: “A lot of this has already happened and it can continue to happen outside the UK, whatever our laws say.”
Microsoft is in talks with select U.S. publishers about a pilot program to help launch a two-sided marketplace that would compensate publishers for their content used by AI products, starting with its Copilot assistant. Microsoft would become the first major tech company to build an AI marketplace for publishers, a milestone in building a sustainable business model for content companies in the AI era.
Meta Platforms has held discussions in recent months with a number of media companies, including Axel Springer, Fox Corp. and News Corp, about licensing their articles for use in its artificial-intelligence tools. Meta, parent of Facebook and Instagram, offers a range of AI-powered products, including a variety of chatbots. Its conversations with media companies have focused on licensing news and other content for use across those products, according to people familiar with the matter.
