The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California approved a settlement agreement for a class action lawsuit against Anthropic, ending a two-year copyright dispute with a $1.5 billion settlement. The ruling split AI data scraping into two distinct legal issues: legitimate scraping for reading can be exempted from liability, while illegal acquisition and hoarding must be severely punished. On July 10, three major international academic publishing groups Hachette, Cengage, and Elsevier, together with well-known writers, sued Google in the Federal Court of New York, accusing it of scraping millions of journals and books without permission and deleting copyright metadata. OpenAI faces dual lawsuits from The New York Times and the Authors Guild of America, with no consensus after over two years of licensing negotiations. Meta's Llama series models are also mired in copyright disputes. On June 23, 2025, presiding judge William Alsup clarified that bulk crawling of pirated resources and permanently archiving books cannot use "fair use" as a shield, as pirated copies pose a potential threat to the genuine market. The $1.5 billion settlement is essentially a punishment for Anthropic's past acts of illegally acquiring and hoarding pirated data.