Authors hoping for their share of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement received unexpected emails this week. These messages informed them that another party was making a claim on their payments.
Anthropic settled a copyright class action suit last 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 deal received final approval in July, allowing the payments to move forward.
How the money is split
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.
Writers have been posting on social media that publishers seem to be claiming more than their fair share of some payments. Mystery and thriller author April Henry asked, “WTF 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).”
Victoria Strauss wrote at the popular blog Writers Beware that she has been receiving author complaints that fall into two broad categories. One involves publishers seeking payment for works that they no longer have a legitimate claim on because the rights have reverted. The other involves publishers seeking 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 be plausibly explained by poor recordkeeping” — and she noted that some publishers have already said this is a mistake that they have asked Anthropic to fix.
Similarly, Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told The New York Times that she does not see this as “a grab by the publishers” and that she does not believe publishers are “specifically trying to screw any author over.” Instead, she argued that this is the predictable result of bad record-keeping and a confusing settlement process.
Strauss also acknowledged that any complaints she has seen are just “a peek through a small crack in a massive wall.”
“But the unusually large number of reports I’ve 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 aren’t the kind of routine glitches you might expect from such a large operation, but something much more wide[s]pread and systemic,” she wrote.
Agents are also seeking a cut of the payments. Strauss said she has gotten complaints that a number of literary agencies are also making claims, which she said is surprising since “agents are not rightsholders in the books that they sell.”
Author Courtney Milan, the pen name of former law clerk and law professor Heidi Bond, was more blunt in a post on Bluesky. She wrote, “Apparently 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!”
Milan and the Authors Guild also shared more details about how authors can dispute their payment allocations. One tricky issue is 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 “download date” in the settlement.
What it means
Authors need to check their payout notices carefully. If a publisher claims money for a book they no longer own, the author will lose half the $3,000 award. Disputes must be filed quickly, and the clock starts ticking from August 10, 2022, for books where rights have reverted.
