The Anthropic settlement, Part the Nth, this time from the New York Times. The link beneath the image is a gift link if you want to read it in full.

Excerpts, with my comments in bold.

The sum is gargantuan: $1.5 billion.

But as thousands of authors wait for their cut of the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history from Anthropic, the tech giant that used pirated books to train its artificial intelligence chatbot, some are accusing the publishers of their books of trying to squeeze them out of a percentage of the payout.

The haggling is coming into plain view as a settlement administrator attempts to clear up who owns the rights to some of the more than 482,000 books covered by the agreement in the class-action case, which was approved in July by a judge in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.

Dana sez–Anthropic scraped 32 of my books, 30 novels and two anthologies. I didn’t file on the anthologies because up front I asked for and got the standard reversion of rights to the story included in both anthologies. Specifically, that the publisher was allowed an eighteen-month period to sell the anthology without competition, after which I was allowed to sell my story elsewhere or publish it myself. I’ve done both.

Authors could receive up to $3,000 for each one of their books that a judge ruled last year were illegally downloaded and stored by Anthropic in the development of its online chatbot Claude.

But they must split the proceeds with publishers they granted book rights to and with co-authors, according to the Authors Guild, a trade group.

Dana sez–Of the thirty scraped novels, eleven were undisputed by the publisher. Of the other nineteen, I contested two because the rights had reverted long ago. The rest I did the default, a 50-50 split with the publisher, an inordinately generous amount to the publisher.

However, Anthropic has admitted fault and said out loud in front of a judge that they’re going to atone for their criminal behavior with actual money. They could have fought it, in which case all us writers would probably have died without seeing a dime. Further, they paid for a user-friendly interface with which to claim my pirated books and staff who actually responded to emails when I needed help.

The result may be that at some future date some money shows up in my bank account that I never expected to see. If and when that happens, I will be grateful to the authors who filed the original lawsuit, to the Authors Guild, and to the court. And, it turns out, Eminem.

Kristelia García, a professor at Georgetown Law who specializes in copyright law, said the dynamics of divvying up the Anthropic settlement funds were reminiscent of a 2007 federal lawsuit over the distribution of digital royalties for the music of the rapper Eminem.

Producers who discovered Eminem sued a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group and argued that they should receive a higher percentage of royalties from downloads at iTunes and other digital stores.

The two sides reached a settlement in 2012.

Dana sez–In service of this post, I asked Gemini to create an image of Anthropic’s Claude gulping down my books. Nailed it on the second try. I used the first one for the featured image.

Uncategorized Anthropic settlement NYTimes