SLS 9/12/25 - O²CM Bookish Byte

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On September 5, 2025, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement after using pirated books to train its AI. This landmark case sets new boundaries between fair use, piracy, and innovation and it has big implications for schools and libraries. For educators, this is a teachable moment. It opens conversations about digital citizenship, copyright, and ethical AI.

How it started
Back in 2023 and 2024, authors began asking: “Are my books inside these chatbots?” Researchers soon confirmed that many large language models were trained on massive text dumps from the internet. That included millions of books pulled from piracy sites like LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror.

The lawsuit
In early 2025, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson led a class-action suit against Anthropic. Their claim was simple: our copyrighted work was copied and used to make your product more powerful and profitable, and we weren’t asked or paid.

The judge weighs in
By June, U.S. District Judge William Alsup made an important distinction:

If a company buys books legally and uses them in training, there’s an argument that this could fall under fair use.
But pirated files? That’s copyright infringement, plain and simple.

The turning point
Facing the possibility of billions in damages—potentially enough to bankrupt the company—Anthropic decided to settle instead of risking trial.

The settlement
On September 5, 2025, Anthropic agreed to:

Pay $1.5 billion into a fund for authors (about $3,000 per book).
Delete all the pirated files and any AI training data that came from them.
Launch a searchable database so authors can check if their works were used.

From Collette Jakubowicz, Mrs. J in the Library

The beginning of the year is an important time for teacher-librarians and media specialists as we introduce the library to new and returning students. Every year, I used to struggle to come up with something new and fun for library orientation. I pick a different library theme each school year.

In past years, my library themes have included:

Superheroes (which was also our school-wide theme that year)
Read S’more Books (camping & outdoors)
Blast Off with Reading (outer space & planets)
Pirates or Under the Sea Adventures (ocean & beach)
Go Bananas for Books (rainforest & monkeys)

I often match the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade library orientation to that theme, and I designed a life-size board game for students to play during their first library class using the whole library as the “game board”.

What I like about playing a game for orientation is that it makes reviewing the library procedures more physically active and engaging. Students aren’t sitting the whole time and listening to me talk; they are working together and helping each other review how the school library works. Continue reading...