Some authors hoping to receive their share of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement said they received surprising emails this week: emails informing them that someone else was demanding their payments.
anthropic Settled Copyright Class Action Lawsuit last year, after a judge ruled that training AI models on copyrighted material is legal under the fair use doctrine, but pirating that material was not. The deal received final approval in July, allowing payments to move forward.
Under the terms of the agreement, the authors of almost 500,000 titles will be paid $3,000 for each pirated work. If the book is still printed at a traditional publisher, the money will be split 50/50 between the author and the publisher. If the book was self-published, or if the publisher reverted royalties by allowing the book to go out of print, then the author should receive full payment.
But writers have been posting on social media that publishers appear to be demanding more than their fair share of some payments. For example, mystery and thriller author April Henry asked“What the fuck is HarperCollins playing? They claimed one of my books about the Anthropic Settlement that was reversed at least 17 years ago AND the same day I got a credit alert saying they had been added as my employer! (which was never the case).”
In the popular blog Beware of writersVictoria Strauss wrote that she has been receiving complaints from authors who fall into two broad categories: one in which publishers seek payment for works to which they no longer have a legitimate right (because the rights have reverted), and another in which publishers seek a full 100% payment when they are only entitled to 50%.
In both cases, Strauss said she is “reluctant to attribute to malice what can plausibly be explained by poor record-keeping,” noting that some editors have already said this is an error they have asked Anthropic to correct.
Similarly, Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild, told the New York Times that he does not see this as “an attempt by the publishers” and that he does not believe that the publishers are “specifically trying to ruin any author.” Instead, he argued that this is the predictable result of poor record-keeping and a confusing resolution process.
Strauss also acknowledged that any complaints he has seen are just “a glimpse through a small crack in a huge wall.”
“But the unusually large number of reports I have received in the last two days, as well as the fact that the authors are reporting the exact same errors over and over again, suggest to me that these are not the type of routine failures one might expect from such a large operation, but something much broader.[s]preadolescent and systemic,” he wrote.
And publishers aren’t the only ones seeking a cut of the payments. Strauss said she has received complaints that several literary agencies are also making claims, which she said is surprising since “agents do not own rights to the books they sell.”
Author Courtney Milan (the pseudonym of former paralegal and law professor Heidi Bond) was more direct about a post on Blueskywriting: “Apparently some agents are trying to claim percentages on the Anthropic deal, and I don’t even remotely believe they should do this, what the fuck, stop that shit!”
Milan and the authors guild He also shared more details about how authors can dispute their payment allocations. (A complicated question: when rights revert to a specific book. In order for an author to claim 100% of a book, the rights reversion must have occurred before August 10, 2022, which is the “discharge date” in the agreement.)
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