Humanity has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to resolve a class action lawsuit with a group of authors who alleged that artificial intelligence startups had illegally accessed their books.
The company paid about $3,000 and interest per book, and agreed to destroy the dataset containing material that is allegedly piercing, according to a filing on Friday.
Litigations against humanity are being closely monitored by AI startups and media companies seeking to determine the meaning of copyright infringement in the age of AI. If a human settlement is approved, this, according to submission, would be the largest publicly reported copyright restoration in history.
“This settlement sends a strong message to AI companies and creators that it is wrong to take copyrighted works from these pirate websites,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Justin Nelson told CNBC in a statement.
Humanity did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California was filed last year by Andrea Burtz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The lawsuit alleged that humanity “has carried out a massive copyright infringement by downloading and commercially using books obtained from pirated datasets,” Filing said.
In June, the judge ruled that humanity’s use of books to train AI models was “fair use,” but ordered a trial to assess whether the company infringed copyright by obtaining works from Database Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The case was scheduled to go to trial in December, filed Friday.
Earlier this week, humanity said it had shut down a $13 billion funding round valued at $183 billion. Funding was led by Iconiq, Fidelity Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
