Some authors hoping to receive a share of the $1.5 billion copyright settlement with Anthropic said they received a surprising email this week. It was an email informing them that someone else was claiming their payment.
Anthropic settled a copyright class action lawsuit last year after a judge ruled that training AI models with copyrighted material is legal under fair use doctrine, but pirating that material is illegal. The deal received final approval in July, allowing payment to proceed.
Under the terms of the settlement, the authors of approximately 500,000 titles will be paid $3,000 for each pirated work. If the book is still in print with a traditional publisher, the amount is split 50-50 between the author and the publisher. If the book is self-published, or if the publisher allows the book to go out of print and returns the rights, the author should receive the full amount.
However, writers have posted on social media that publishers appear to be charging more than their fair share of some payments. Mystery and thriller author April Henry, for example, asked, “What the hell is HarperCollins thinking? They claimed one of my books on human settlement that goes back at least 17 years, and that same day I received a credit alert saying they were added as my employer! (They never were).”
Victoria Strauss wrote on her popular blog Writers Beware that complaints from authors fall into two broad categories. One is where the publisher is seeking payment for a work to which it has lost legal rights (because the rights have been returned), and the other is where the publisher is seeking full payment of 100% when the publisher is only entitled to 50%.
In both cases, Strauss said he was “reluctant to ascribe malice to what can plausibly be explained by poor record-keeping,” and noted that some publishers have already said this is an error and are asking Anthropic to correct it.
Similarly, Mary Razenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, told the New York Times that she doesn’t think this is a “publisher extortion” and that she doesn’t think publishers are “especially trying to screw over writers.” Rather, she argued, this was the predictable result of poor record-keeping and a chaotic settlement process.
Ms. Strauss also acknowledged that all the complaints she has seen are “little cracks in a huge wall.”
“However, the unusual number of reports we have received over the past two days, and the fact that authors are reporting the exact same error over and over again, suggests that this is something more widespread and systemic, rather than a routine glitch of the kind you would expect in such a large-scale operation,” she wrote.
And it’s not just publishers who want a cut of the payments. Strauss said he has received complaints that many literary agencies are also making claims, which is surprising because “agents are not the rights holders of the books they sell.”
Author Courtney Millan (the pen name of former law clerk and law professor Heidi Bond) was more blunt in a post on Bluesky: “Apparently some investigators are trying to claim a percentage of the Humanity Settlement, and I just don’t think they should do this. Oh my god, don’t do that!”
Milan and the Writers Guild also shared details on how authors can contest payment allocations. (One issue to be aware of is when the rights to a particular book are reverted. For an author to claim 100% rights to the book, the reversion must occur before the Settlement’s “download date” of August 10, 2022.)
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