Authors push back as publishers and agents make claims on Anthropic settlement
Some authors hoping to receive their share of Anthropicās $1.5 billion copyright settlement said they received surprising emails this week ā emails informing them that someone else was making a claim on their payments. Anthropicsettled a copyright class action suitlast year, after a judge ruled that training AI models on copyrighted material is legal under fair use doctrine, but pirating that material was not. The dealreceived final approvalin July, allowing the payments to move forward. Under the terms of the settlement, the authors of nearly 500,000 titles will be paid $3,000 for each pirated work. If the book is still in-print with a traditional publisher, the money will be split 50-50 between author and publisher. If the book was self-published, or if the publisher reverted the rights by allowing the book to go out-of-print, then the author should get the entire payment. But writers have been posting on social media that publishers seem to be claiming more than their fair share of some payments. For example, mystery and thriller author April Henryasked, āWTF is HarperCollins playing at? They claimed one of my books on the Anthropic Settlement that reverted back at least 17 years ago AND on the same day I got a credit alert saying they had been added as my employer! (which they never were).ā Atthe popular blog Writers Beware, Victoria Strauss wrote that sheās been receiving author complaints that fall into two broad categories: one where publishers are seeking payment for works that they no longer have a legitimate claim on (because the rights have reverted), and another where publishers are seeking a full 100% payment when theyāre only entitled to 50%. In both cases, Strauss said sheās āreluctant to attribute to malice what can be plausibly explained by poor recordkeepingā ā and she noted that some publishers have already said this is a mistake that theyāve asked Anthropic to fix. Similarly,Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told The New York Timesthat she doesnāt see this as āa grab by the publishersā and that she doesnāt believe publishers are āspecifically trying to screw any author over.ā Instead, she argued that this is the predictable result of bad record-keeping and a confusing settlement process. Strauss also acknowledged that any complaints sheās seen are just āa peek through a small crack in a massive wall.ā āBut the unusually large number of reports Iāve received over the last two days, as well as the fact that authors are reporting the exact same errors over and over, suggest to me that these arenāt the kind of routine glitches you might expect from such a large operation, but something much more wide[s]pread and systemic,ā she wrote. And publishers arenāt the only ones seeking a cut of the payments. Strauss said sheās gotten complaints that a number of literary agencies are also making claims, which she said is surprising since āagents are not rightsholders in the books that they sell.ā Author Courtney Milan (the pen name of former law clerk and law professor Heidi Bond) was more blunt ina post on Bluesky, writing, āApparently some agents are trying to claim percentages on the Anthropic settlement, and I do not REMOTELY think they should do this, what the fuck, stop that shit!ā Milanandthe Authors Guildalso shared more details about how authors can dispute their payment allocations. (One tricky issue: When the rights to a specific book reverted. In order for an author to make a 100% claim on a book, the rights reversion needs to have happened before August 10, 2022, which is the ādownload dateā in the settlement.)
