Finding myself with a rare day off, I flew to Santa Clara, California, last Friday to sit in on a legal conference devoted to the issue of copyright. As one does.

I went because several of my fellow authors are hopping mad at the outcome of an AI copyright case they actually won, and the judge in that decision was on the bill. Plus, I’m an incorrigible copyright nerd.**

Over the past two years I’ve been immersed in the fight over the nonconsensual use of books to train the world’s largest AI models. Two of my own books were pirated and used to train Anthropic’s Claude model. (Which is my LLM of choice! Yes, reader, I am paying twenty clams a month to my thief.)

Friday’s Intellectual Property Law Conference, organized by the Datta Center for High Tech Law at the Santa Clara University School of Law, offered the chance to meet some of the people deciding today’s most important AI lawsuits.

I came away a little wiser and more hopeful.

There are currently dozens of copyright infringement cases brought against giants like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta. One of the most important, Bartz v. Anthropic, is a class-action lawsuit brought in Northern California by authors whose works were pirated by Anthropic. That case is in the process of settlement. In September, Anthropic agreed to pay $3,000 per title (half to the author, half to the publisher), or around $1.5 billion in total.

There’s now a debate raging right now among my fellow writers: Take the Bartz money or hold out for more? The deadline for opting out is Feb. 9, one week from today.

Some authors think it’s not enough. They want to bring tech companies to their knees.

I’d never heard of William Alsup prior to the Bartz case. After hearing him speak on Friday, I’m dismayed at my former ignorance.

In a quarter-century on the federal bench he decided a wide range of cases, effectively saving the DACA “Dreamers” immigration program in 2018, and holding PG&E to account for the catastrophic wildfires their power lines were sparking across California. But that doesn’t get at his core.

“Fairness and decency have always been important concepts for me,” he said on Friday. Born into a white Mississippi family during the Jim Crow era, Alsup turned against white supremacy as a young man. “Our parents taught us to be fair, don’t lie, be decent. So we had two regimes in parallel: segregation, and decency/fairness. My friends and I in high school looked around and saw that Black people could not vote, attend the same public schools, or use the libraries. We asked: What’s fair and decent about that?”

In college he led the fight to bring the head of the Mississippi NAACP to speak on the campus of Mississippi State University, two years after MSU admitted its first Black students. After law school, he clerked for the legendary Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. That search for fairness and decency never ended.

Edward Lee, the Santa Clara law professor whose hard-hitting Substack is devoured by AI’s top skeptical minds, called Alsup “one of the most transformative judges many of us will see in our lifetime.”

Which means, fellow authors and artists, we got a favorable draw with the judge in this case. If he signed off on the Bartz settlement as a fair one, believe it. Judge Alsup’s decisions have a well-earned reputation for being upheld on appeal. We’re not going to find a better deal elsewhere.

His comments on damage awards also play into my thinking here. “Damages,” Alsup said on Friday, “should be restricted to what harm has truly been caused. Lawyers can be good at making it sound like a single patent is worth 1% of all iPhone sales.”

Anthropic pirated two of my books, out of 500,000. Does that mean I’m owed 1/250,000th of Anthropic’s future earnings? No. Look into the history of significant copyright cases like Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith and you’ll see that it takes a near one-to-one usurpation of market value to win significant damages for harm.

As the conference neared its close, it fell to B.J. Ard, a law professor from the University of Wisconsin, to offer cautionary advice to those of us defending our creative work from the AI machine.

Today’s AI copyright battles have become central to the public debate about AI, he said, because “they provide some of the only formal venues for actually airing out or working through these issues.”

Copyright has become a proxy for all the larger fights around the threat of AI: job destruction, labor policy, privacy concerns, the future of creativity and human autonomy.

“These are all issues that I care deeply about,” Ard said, “but there are limits to what copyright can do or could be expected to do.”

Winning legal copyright battles may force tech companies to curb their blatant piracy. But copyright alone can’t halt AI’s advance. The dream of a righteous almighty smiting—the false hope offered by ClaimsHero—is absolutely tempting. Writers craft stories where heroes vanquish villains. We love a poetic ending.

The AI copyright story doesn’t end that way. It’s messy. It’s complicated. It’s unsatisfying. With the Bartz settlement it doesn’t resolve in perfect fairness. It just bends the plot in that direction.

_{** The malady was contracted, I believe, in the early 1990s when I compiled the collection that would become Northwest Passages: A Literary Anthology of the Pacific Northwest from Coyote Tales to Roadside Attractions. One thing they neglect to tell you about historical anthologies is that you end up spending months tracking down the rights holders of every single excerpt. Which involves arcane publishing industry mergers, bitter family estate disputes, and a certain amount of personal supplication offered to the surviving widows and widowers of famous authors. Future editors beware.}

Authors: To file a claim in the Bartz settlement, go to the official case website here. It’s easy to do. The deadline for opting out of the settlement (in order to file your own lawsuit) is Feb. 9. The deadline for filing a claim is March 30.