Annelise Levy writes: “A California federal judge granted preliminary approval of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement to resolve authors’ copyright class action over the artificial intelligence company’s downloading of millions of pirated books. Anthropic will pay about $3,000 for each of the 482,460 books it downloaded from pirate libraries Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, and destroy the original and copied files. The decision comes weeks after Judge William Alsup on September 8 postponed approval of the deal and slammed class lawyers over concerns they were striking a deal behind the scenes.”