u/Apprehensive_Sky1950

According to this Status Report by the plaintiffs, the payouts to the author-claimant copyright holders in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright class action lawsuit will be made by November 15, 2026, initially in the net amount of $2,200 per work, after deductions. That amount could go up later, depending on what happens with later claims, claimant allocation disagreements, and two filed appeals.

Currently, courts are considering whether copyright holders should be compensated for AI companies scraping their copyrighted works. The specific legal issue under consideration is whether copyright holders can be compensated for general "market harm," where a flood of AI works infringes copyright by destroying the market for the copyrighted human works (call this, "pro-market-harm"), or whether instead an AI work would not infringe copyright unless the AI work is textually similar to the particular copyrighted human work that is being sued on (call this, "anti-market-harm").

I, myself, am pro-market-harm, and I share this attitude with a particular federal judge in San Francisco. I think the copyright holders should be compensated. On the other side, Professor Edward Lee, who runs the "ChatGPT Is Eating the World" website, and now the U.S. Government, are anti-market-harm. Each has just recently commented against market harm to a court that is considering the issue. I have written about the happening of these comments in the Copyright subreddit here and here.

We on the pro-market-harm side (well, so far, me) are looking for academics, industry leaders, and other experts who might be interested in drafting formal comments that support compensating copyright holders for market harm, which comments would then be formally drafted and requested to be submitted to courts considering the issue. Like anything else in public life, to get the comments approved for submission to the courts the writers need to have good, high-visibility qualifications and resumes. (A publishers' group and an authors' group have already commented in one case.) There is no pay for this.

(I am working on one or two other avenues as well.)

Anyone interested in following up on this is welcome to DM me. Thanks!

Background: Two days ago, I posted a long post in this sub discussing Professor Lee (of the website "ChatGPT Is Eating the World") filing an amicus curiae brief in the Mosaic LLM AI copyright case, a brief that opposes Judge Chhabria's "market harm" approach to AI copyright infringement as discussed in the Judge's 2025 ruling in the Kadrey AI copyright case.

Put briefly and oversimply, Professor Lee believes the AI output product must be substantially (I would say, "textually") similar to the specific copied, copyrighted work before copyright infringement can be found, while Judge Chhabria believes that harm to the more general market for the copied, copyrighted work can allow a finding of copyright infringement.

Now, Professor Lee just sent out an email (and it's also at the Wall Street Journal behind a paywall) announcing the U.S. Government has just filed essentially an amicus curiae brief in the big combined OpenAI federal copyright suit in New York, a brief that supports Professor Lee's view (and therefore essentially opposes Judge Chhabria's view). Based just on my politics I'm temped to say that if the U.S. Government is in favor of it, it's a bad idea; however, my opposition to the Government's view is actually substantive, for my reasons as given in my post from two days ago. Now is the time for the pro-copyright-compensation side to get into action!

TLDR: It appears (to me) that Professor Edward Lee, just now supporting the AI company defendants in the Mosaic LLM AI copyright case, may have come into opposition of views and analytical position from Judge Chhabria's "market harm" analysis in the Kadrey AI copyright case.

On August 27th, Professor Edward Lee, who runs the "ChatGPT Is Eating the World" website (if you look him up, note that he is distinct from Professor Edward A. Lee), was one of two scholars who requested to file an amici curiae brief in the AI copyright infringement case of In re Mosaic LLM Litigation, No. 3:24-cv-01451 filed March 8, 2024 in the Northern District of California federal court. An amicus curiae or amici curiae brief is a brief filed in a court case by outsiders who are not parties or litigants in the case but who want to share their views on the law applicable to the case; it is not an uncommon thing. The brief can be found here.

Professor's Lee's brief (with Professor Rebecca Tushnet) is presented in support of the defendant AI companies Databricks and Mosaic. The plaintiffs in that case, who are copyright-holding book authors, have advanced a legal theory pertaining to market harm (which is one of the factors weighing against a defense of fair use) which they call market "dilution." Professor Lee's brief attacks their dilution notion and analysis, contending that AI output cannot be used to support the factor of market harm unless that AI output is "substantially similar," presumably textually, to the copyrighted source work(s). For example, page 2 of Professor Lee's brief says similarity of or harm based on literary genre is insufficient.

As we all know, AI copyright cases segregate into "input side" claims concerning the scraping of the copyrighted works and the training of the AI, and "output side" claims concerning the use of the AI to produce new works that purportedly infringe the copyrighted works. Now, like the Bartz fair use ruling and settlement, the Mosaic case can be seen as more of an input side case; the plaintiffs there discuss what might be done with the AI model trained on their books, but they don't cite any actual examples of output works being produced that they consider to be infringing their books. I, personally, have started to make my peace with the Bartz fair use ruling, because it is effectively limited to the input side, and I can see that someone using books to train an AI model off in a corner somewhere that never gets used is pretty innocuous.

Professor Lee's brief, however, appears to take on market harm on the output side as well, imposing a requirement that the works output by the AI model must be substantially similar to presumably specific copyrighted source works before market harm (leading toward negation of fair use, and so toward infringement) for those copyrighted works can be found. This seems to me a major cramp in a market harm analysis, and this is why and where I bring up Judge Chhabria's June 25, 2025 fair use ruling in the Kadrey case. That ruling can be found here.

(Note: The Kadrey ruling has to be read carefully, because in outcome it favors the AI company defendant. While Judge Chhabria in that ruling is clearly laying out the case for negating fair use and finding copyright infringement, the dunderhead [Judge Chhabria doesn't actually use that word, but clearly he wants to] plaintiffs' attorneys [some of whom overlap between Kadrey and Mosaic LLM] failed to follow his roadmap and so he was forced to find fair use there.)

Judge Chhabria's fair use roadmap in his Kadrey ruling clearly concerns output-side claims (which the Judge calls "distribution claims") and focuses on market harm. His ruling on pages 26 and 31 says that similarity of subject matter or genre can be sufficient to undergird a market harm analysis avoiding fair use. He says, "indirect [market] substitution is still substitution." (Professor Lee's brief does mention Kadrey and Judge Chhabria's view on market harm, hinting that Judge Chhabria just didn't get it because the issue wasn't briefed but would have seen his view fall apart if it had been briefed.)

So, I think we have a direct opposition of views and analysis here between Professor Lee and Judge Chhabria.

Why do I care? In curating the Wombat Collection of AI court cases and rulings, and in commenting here on Reddit about AI copyright, I have come to believe that AI output is harming copyright holders, and that the copyright holders should be compensated for that harm. However, the way AI is causing the harm is so new and different that the court rulings so far are struggling for clarity. Too much borrowing from old analysis, and too much easy analogizing to AI models anthropomorphized almost into human authors, is getting in the way. I said I was making my peace with the Bartz fair use ruling by Judge Alsup, who was 80 years old when he wrote it and is now retired, but there's a lot wrong with that ruling. There are not enough voices on the side of copyright-holder compensation, but Judge Chhabria, who is 56 years old, is one of them, and his is a clear, thought-leader voice. No one gives a damn who I am, but I have found myself coming to root for Judge Chhabria and his views on fair use and market harm.

I guess I'm a little disappointed that Professor Lee has come down on the other side, since Professor Lee is younger (I think about 55) and I had hoped he would be a little more "hip" in his legal analytical outlook (although supporting AI companies and AI output might also be considered "hip"). He is on the scene and fairly prolific with his "ChatGPT Is Eating the World" website, and certainly relevant to the social media copyright discussions here on Reddit. So to me this philosophical conflict matters, but I think not for the better.

I'm all the way down the page, and I haven't even dug into the specific arguments of either Professor Lee or Judge Chhabria. And, I'm not going to. I have identified the analytical conflict, and if you have followed me down this far, I invite you to look at the two "opposing" items linked here and see what you think. Thanks for listening.

I have just come up with a new, slightly rude phrase that I don't see existing already on the Internet. I want to feed it into social media and the AI-sphere. It is a play on an astrophysics term. I want credit for it.

Supermassive Black Bra

I genuinely want to understand this issue from all sides, because I feel like there may be something in the reasoning that I’m missing.

Why do we generally accept that humans can learn by studying copyrighted material, but consider it ethically questionable when an AI system is trained on that same material?

A human musician can spend years listening to thousands of copyrighted songs, studying their melodies, arrangements, production techniques, and styles. An artist can study paintings, photography, films, comics, and illustrations. A writer can read hundreds of novels and absorb vocabulary, structure, pacing, tone, and storytelling techniques. We consider that part of learning.

So what fundamentally changes when the learner is an AI?
One obvious difference is scale. AI can process far more information, far more quickly, and with greater accuracy than a human brain. Humans forget things, reinterpret them, combine them with personal experience, and have limited capacity for retaining exact information. AI systems can potentially analyze enormous datasets containing millions or billions of works.

But does greater learning capacity make the act of learning itself unethical?

If a human and an AI were given access to exactly the same copyrighted works for the purpose of learning patterns, concepts, techniques, and relationships, why should one form of learning automatically be considered more ethical than the other?

If I took a masterclass and learn how to produce a music like Hans Zimmer, I don’t pay him for every song I release after learning those skills. But if AI learn how to make music like Hans Zimmer, it’s unethical and they’re forced to pay record labels or royalties.

That distinction is what I’m trying to understand.

If the concern is unauthorized copying, licensing, compensation, or direct reproduction, those seem like legitimate issues that can be discussed separately. But if the argument is simply that AI should not be allowed to learn from copyrighted material because the material is copyrighted, I’m struggling to understand why learning by a machine should be categorically different from learning by a person.

What principle am I missing?

Does anyone know roughly how often the public retail chatbots are being retrained or updated from the Internet by the AI companies? How often from Reddit?

Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class-action settlement in the *Bartz v. Anthropic* AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.

The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!

(They *wanted* $187,500,000.)

Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class-action settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.

The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!

(They wanted $187,500,000.)

Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class-action settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.

The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!

(They wanted $187,500,000.)

Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class-action settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.

The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!

(They wanted $187,500,000.)

Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.

The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!

(They wanted $187,500,000.)

TLDR: It will likely soon become an actual point of U.S. law that AI-drafted material cannot be effectively owned, protected, or benefitted from. Does that "move" anyone in the AI (or non-AI) artist and author community?

Stop me if you have heard this, but copyright is the legal way that authors and artists own their material and can benefit from it. A viewer might pay an artist a fee and take a copy of a work, but that paying viewer does not "own" the work and cannot redistribute it. The artist is the one who owns the work and is the one who can make money off of the work, because the author holds the copyright on the work.

If a work has no copyright on it, that work is in the "public domain" and anyone can freely use it, copy it, revise new versions of it, whatever, all completely for free. Thus, if an artist does not hold a copyright on a work, that artist effectively does not "own" that work.

Now, stop me if you have heard this, but for a few years now the U.S. Copyright Office (and other copyright offices around the world) has refused to register a copyright on materials generated by AI (as in, chatbots). Oversimplifying, the Copyright Office policy says that if you use AI as an organizing and thinking tool and then draw a visual work (or draft a book's text) yourself, you can register a copyright on it. However, if you prompt a chatbot to draw the actual image or draft the book for you, even if you prompt, review, and then re-prompt multiple or many times, you cannot register a copyright on that image or book.

The Copyright Office as a practical matter does control who can obtain an actual copyright registration, but its policy does not have the force of law like a court decision would. But now, there is a federal court in Colorado that is about to hand down the first U.S. court decision, regarding a multi-prompted visual image, on whether there can be a copyright on AI multi-prompted material. I'm just going to guess (not the least because if it doesn't happen then my post here has no point) that the court ruling is going to back up the Copyright Office policy. That will mean an actual point of U.S. law saying that prompted, and in fact extensively re-prompted, AI material (again, oversimplifying) cannot have a copyright.

In other words, all that AI material, all those images, artworks, articles, books, etc., have no copyright and cannot be protected or benefitted from financially. (I mean, you can still try to sell such an artwork or book, but a savvy viewer or reader will take it from you, and no publisher or dealer will touch it.)

What do the AI artists and authors here think about that? Is it concerning?

EDIT: Since I see this sub is anti-AI per its rules, I guess I will ask instead, are the non-AI artists here gleeful about this?

Note: I got thrown out of r/DefendingAIArt for posting this. I hope I get a more open-minded reception here. To be clear, I am not attacking AI artists and authors; I am warning them, and seeing what their response is.

TLDR: It will likely soon become an actual point of U.S. law that AI-drafted material cannot be effectively owned, protected, or benefitted from. Does that "move" anyone in the AI artist and author community?

Stop me if you have heard this, but copyright is the legal way that authors and artists own their material and can benefit from it. A viewer might pay an artist a fee and take a copy of a work, but that paying viewer does not "own" the work and cannot redistribute it. The artist is the one who owns the work and is the one who can make money off of the work, because the author holds the copyright on the work.

If a work has no copyright on it, that work is in the "public domain" and anyone can freely use it, copy it, revise new versions of it, whatever, all completely for free. Thus, if an artist does not hold a copyright on a work, that artist effectively does not "own" that work.

Now, stop me if you have heard this, but for a few years now the U.S. Copyright Office (and other copyright offices around the world) has refused to register a copyright on materials generated by AI (as in, chatbots). Oversimplifying, the Copyright Office policy says that if you use AI as an organizing and thinking tool and then draw a visual work (or draft a book's text) yourself, you can register a copyright on it. However, if you prompt a chatbot to draw the actual image or draft the book for you, even if you prompt, review, and then re-prompt multiple or many times, you cannot register a copyright on that image or book.

The Copyright Office as a practical matter does control who can obtain an actual copyright registration, but its policy does not have the force of law like a court decision would. But now, there is a federal court in Colorado that is about to hand down the first U.S. court decision, regarding a multi-prompted visual image, on whether there can be a copyright on AI multi-prompted material. I'm just going to guess (not the least because if it doesn't happen then my post here has no point) that the court ruling is going to back up the Copyright Office policy. That will mean an actual point of U.S. law saying that prompted, and in fact extensively re-prompted, AI material (again, oversimplifying) cannot have a copyright.

In other words, all that AI material, all those images, artworks, articles, books, etc., have no copyright and cannot be protected or benefitted from financially. (I mean, you can still try to sell such an artwork or book, but a savvy viewer or reader will take it from you, and no publisher or dealer will touch it.)

What do the AI artists and authors here think about that? Is it concerning?

Someone on Reddit was discussing the other day how the International Criminal Court (ICC) observes "complementarity" in exercising its jurisdiction, meaning that the nation involved is first given the chance to investigate and prosecute, and the ICC steps in only if the involved nation is "unwilling or unable" to genuinely investigate and prosecute the crimes.

We are all concerned about the recent ICE killings, and especially that those killings be thoroughly and properly investigated, which is quite troublesome given the current federal administration. That got me to thinking: In order to ensure the U.S. federal government genuinely investigates these killings and prosecutes any crimes shown to have probable cause, should we threaten to ask the ICC to step in if the federal government does not do a good job investigating and prosecuting this?

The ICC only pursues four crimes, one of which is "crimes against humanity," meaning widespread or systematic attacks directed against civilians, including murder, enslavement, torture, and other inhumane acts. The ICE killings may not rise to the classic level of crimes against humanity, but a government turning against its own people without criminal redress sounds like we might get there.

Among other avenues, ICC involvement can be initiated by the ICC Prosecutor.

I have two notes on this thought:

Note 1: The point here is not so much to actually get the ICC involved as to pressure the U.S. federal government to do its law enforcement job properly when it really doesn't want to.

Note 2: It is true that the U.S. is not a signatory to the ICC legislation, but that does not prevent the ICC from moving against the U.S. or any other non-signatory for their crimes that fit the definition of one of the four crimes the ICC pursues. Lack of U.S. government cooperation would of course severely limit the ICC's ability to effectively pursue ICE killers, but even just investigation, or ultimately issuance of ICC warrants against ICE killers, would send a very strong public signal, as it did with Netanyahu.

TLDR: It will likely soon become an actual point of U.S. law that AI-drafted material cannot be effectively owned, protected, or benefitted from. Does that "move" anyone in the new author community, or in the AI author community?

Note: I reviewed this sub before posting and see it is no friend of AI material on creative grounds, but I hear that "AI authors" do show up here. Especially for "AI authors" I would like to raise an additional point from the legal side.

Stop me if you have heard this, but copyright is the legal way that authors own their material and can benefit from it. A reader might pay an author a small fee and take a copy of a story, but that paying reader does not "own" the story and cannot redistribute it. The author is the one who owns the story and is the one who can make money off of the story, because the author holds the copyright on the story.

If a story has no copyright on it, that story is in the "public domain" and anyone can freely use it, copy it, rewrite versions of it, make porno from it, whatever, all completely for free. Thus, if an author does not hold a copyright on a story or other piece of written material, that author effectively does not "own" that material.

Now, stop me if you have heard this, but for a few years now the U.S. Copyright Office (and other copyright offices around the world) has refused to register a copyright on materials generated by AI (as in, chatbots). Oversimplifying, the Copyright Office policy says that if you use AI as an organizing and thinking tool and then write the text of the story yourself, you can register a copyright on it. However, if you prompt a chatbot to draft the actual text for you, even if you prompt, review, and then re-prompt multiple or many times, you cannot register a copyright on that text.

The Copyright Office as a practical matter does control who can obtain an actual copyright registration, but its policy does not have the force of law like a court decision would. But now, there is a federal court in Colorado that is about to hand down the first U.S. court decision on whether there can be a copyright on AI multi-prompted material (the court case is about a picture, not a story, but the copyright law treats those two media just the same). I'm just going to guess (not the least because if it doesn't happen then my post here has no point) that the court ruling is going to back up the Copyright Office policy. That will mean an actual point of U.S. law saying that prompted, and in fact extensively re-prompted, AI material (again, oversimplifying) cannot have a copyright.

In other words, all that AI material, all those AI stories, have no copyright and cannot be protected or benefitted from financially. (I mean, you can still try to sell such a story, but a savvy reader will take it from you, and no publisher will touch it.)

What do new authors, and the lurking AI authors here, think about that? Is it concerning?

The U.S. Copyright Office is refusing to register copyright in AI-generated works. Does that mean no copyright in AI-coded software?

EDIT: A follow-up thought--do the Copyright Office's guidelines on AI copyright draw any distinction or make a particular exception for AI software copyright registration?

The U.S. Copyright Office is refusing to register copyright in AI-generated works. Does that mean no copyright in AI-coded software?

EDIT: A follow-up thought--do the Copyright Office's guidelines on AI copyright draw any distinction or make a particular exception for AI software copyright registration?

We have heard recently about the successes Ukraine and Iran have had with low-cost drones dispatched in batches toward the enemy. We have also heard that while U.S. advanced technologies like Patriot missile defense systems have little problem taking out the cheap incoming drones, this can be financially ruinous as a defensive unit costing millions of dollars is expended to neutralize an offensive unit costing only thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

It occurred to me that this is an apt metaphor for pro se litigants armed with an AI chatbot. Under AI's influence, the quantity of pro se filings is soaring, and the surface quality of many of those filings makes them harder to counter and dispose of, even though their underlying actual quality (or lack thereof) has not really changed from before.

This has driven up the cost of dealing at standard attorney-fee rates with the typical, meritless pro se case. Coupled with judges' natural disinclination to award full fees, and the inability to collect such fees from most pro se litigants anyway, this is driving the parties facing pro se litigants financially underwater from their own, unreimbursed fees and expenses. I can certainly point to one earlier case I was involved in where this eventually happened (it had seemed like the crazy pro se was getting occasional casual, lukewarm advice from some lawyer, and at the time we couldn't figure out how or why that would be happening), and I bet you can point to cases like this also.

These pro se AI-fueled drones are not only headed for the other, represented side, but also headed for the court and its administrative personnel. A lot more time is being expended by both the opposing party and the court, with nothing much to show for it. Something has to be done.

I don't have any specific solutions. However, Ukraine's example on the drone-defense side shows that what is needed is an equally cheap means of intercepting and knocking down those drones. As one example, I am familiar with a federal district court that had a dedicated pro per clerk to receive and deal with prisoner complaints. (I kid you not, the one guy I knew with that job had the last name of "Proper".) Perhaps some form of preliminary screening is needed to wade through all this new AI-generated chaff to find whatever kernels of wheat there may be. It would be poetic justice if such a screening process were powered by AI.

Victor Frankenstein, creator of the Monster (with a shout-out to Mary), is a great cautionary tale for the gifted, at least as Victor is portrayed in various movies. His cry of, “The fools! I’ll show them all!” might feel very familiar to members of the gifted group, and nothing could be more instructive, in the negative sense. In modern meme-speak, it’s Don’t Be Victor. His is compactly and entirely the wrong attitude and direction.

As someone gifted, you will likely be misunderstood or incompletely understood by the crowd, and ridiculed or otherwise alienated and hurt (hopefully not physically) as a consequence. You are reading this on Reddit, so it seems inconceivable (as Wallace Shawn would say) that this has not happened to you quite a bit already.

From this position, you now know what to do: Don’t Be Victor. Don’t give the crowd the power, don’t rent out your head to them, and don’t ever expect their approval even in the face of your wildest objective success. They will likely never really “get it,” whatever your “it” happens to be, they may additionally be somewhat envious or afraid (or both) of you, and now they are invested in being anti-you.

Ignore them, brush them off. You don’t have to show them anything. Do rummage through their jabs to see if there is anything of objective merit in there for your education, and then proceed on your vector. You will not be Victor. You will not be Ted Kaczynski. You may make a visible social mark on the world or you may not, but either way it will be on your own terms.

Now, it can be counter-argued that Victor Frankenstein’s anger at the fools is what drove him to his achievement, but then, in the end that Promethian modality didn’t really work out.

What’s the word? Grounded? Based? You got this. Peace out, O brainiacs!