I understand the legal terminology is different, however at the same time I am not entirely sure if the optics change by calling it Settlement or Penalty. There is only one party paying money here and they are not getting any service after paying this money so its indeed a penalty for what they did before. Any article describing the details has both the key words, its a legal settlement where Anthropic is penalized.
Secondly the future is still not here yet, the people who came forward to sue are mostly in the category of book publishers/authors. The tech companies are are not actively searching for copyright thefts as of yet, however I am sure its just a matter of time when the big blobs of codes get rediscovered specially in case of any publicly visible code
The legal team in the Bartz v. Anthropic case was a coalition of three law firms, funded on a contingency fee basis, which ended up earning them $187 million (12.5%).
Other copyright lawsuits against other major companies are happening.
If a similar lawsuit costs OpenAI more than 1.5B then perhaps Anthropic is better off in their competitive race?
> the people who came forward to sue are mostly in the category of book publishers/authors
Irrelevant. The financially savvy parties are the lawfirm L.L.P.s trying to win money for themselves.