Anthropic judge rejects $1.5B AI copyright settlement

Direct link to Judge Alsup's order: https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Bartzet...

Name should sound familiar to those who follow tech law; he presided over Oracle v Google, along with Anthony Levandowski's criminal case for stealing Waymo tech for Uber.

As someone who has had a passing interest in most of these cases, I've actually come to like Alsup and am impressed by his technical understanding.

His orders and opinions are, imo, a success story of the US judicial system. I think this is true even if you disagree with them

He actually does understand most of what he is ruling on which is a welcome surprise. Not just legal jargon but also the technical spirit of what is at stake.

He's also the one who called bullshit when Oracle tried to claim that Java's function signatures were so novel they should be eligible for copyright. (Generally, arts are copyrightable and engineering is not - there's a creativity requirement.)

They tried to say `rangeCheck(length, start, end)` was novel. He spat back that he'd written equivalent utility functions as a hobbyist hundreds of time!

Art versus engineering is a very dangerous generalization of the law. There is a creativity requirement for copyrightability, but it's an explicitly low bar. Search query "minimal degree of creativity".

The Supreme Court decision in Oracle v Google skipped over copyrightability and addressed fair use. Fair use is a legal defense, applying only in response to finding infringement, which can only be found if material's copyrightable. So the way the Supreme Court made its decision was weird, but it wasn't about the creativity requirement.