I’m happy to see so many writers organizations joining the Authors Guild in urging publishers to relinquish at least some of their Anthropic claims to the authors.

The relationship between an author and their publisher has always depended on trust and an understanding of mutual benefit. The prestige and success of publishing houses is built on the talents of their writers who are now facing an existential threat from AI. The downward trend in writers’ incomes over the last decade is being accelerated by AI’s replacement of human writers—in journalism, corporate writing, and books that mimic authors’ works. Already, we are losing both veteran writers and promising new voices, and it will get worse.

…in the spirit of partnership, and to simplify payouts, we ask publishers to take the following actions to ensure that the benefit of this historic settlement lifts up the entire industry.

1. First, we ask that publishers voluntarily withdraw their claim from books that have been long out of print, regardless of whether there is proof that rights have formally reverted under the contract.

I’ve written here before about how easy the process of claiming your books has been, but I have now had to go through the list twice at the settlement manager’s request to, what, I don’t really know, avow that I told the truth the first time? It feels like a delaying tactic.

2. Second, we call on all publishers to use a portion of their settlement proceeds to compensate those authors whose books were excluded from the settlement because their works were not registered on a timely basis, even though the publisher was required to do so.

It is astonishing to me that any publisher anywhere anytime neglected to copyright works they published. That’s a violation of the copyright clause in every contract I ever signed. Shouldn’t the rights automatically revert to the author? (A rhetorical question only.)

3. Finally, we urge publishers to use the proceeds of the awards to invest in new and diverse books and programs to develop new voices.

Pretty to think so.*

*Apologies. I appear to be channeling my inner Eeyore here.

#thiswritinglife Chatter anthropic AI settlement Authors Guild