Anthropic can finally start writing checks to a group of book authors and publishers who sued the AI ​​lab for copyright infringement. A federal judge on Monday gave final approval to Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement in a copyright class action lawsuit, Reuters reported.

Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued preliminary approval of the settlement last year, after ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.

Alsup has since retired and Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the agreement on Monday.

The payment will provide $3,000 per work on approximately 500,000 works, shared between the authors and publishers who own the rights to them. While the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of US copyright law, many authors and creators still do not see it as a victory.

That’s because of how the legal issue was resolved. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the central issue. It declared 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 did not excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place. Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (good), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup considered the second method illegal on its own terms and said the piracy issue could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement shortly afterward to avoid a trial and any damages a jury might have awarded.

While the final approval closes this case, it does not resolve the industry-wide legal issue 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 about their own facts, which is exactly what is happening elsewhere. There are still a number of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney and OpenAI over whether it is legal to train AI models on copyrighted works. Last week, a group of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and SCRIBE, filed a class-action lawsuit against Google over allegations that the company used their copyrighted works to train its artificial intelligence platform, Gemini.