Why did Anthropic settle with authors for 1.5 billion then? Surely their lawyers must have decided there's a pretty good chance of judges ultimately deciding that it is copyright infringement?
What does that matter? They were sued and the group suing them accepted at $1.5B settlement instead of something theoretically much larger and precedent-setting.
Because the judge ruled that using the books for training was "fair use". The issue was Anthropic downloading and storing pirated content and there is quite a bit of precedent regarding that already...