Authors awaiting their shares of a $1.5 billion copyright settlement with Anthropic have received notices stating that publishers or other entities filed claims for payments allocated to their works. These claims raise questions about the accuracy of rights records and the process for determining the settlement’s beneficiaries.
The settlement followed a class-action lawsuit concerning Anthropic’s use of copyrighted materials to train artificial-intelligence models. According to the source, a judge concluded that training models on copyrighted materials could constitute fair use, but distinguished that from pirating the materials, which does not receive the same protection. The agreement received final approval in July, allowing payment procedures to begin.
How Are the Payments Supposed to Be Distributed?
The settlement covers authors of nearly 500,000 titles, with $3,000 paid for each work that was pirated. If the book is still in print with a traditional publisher, the payment is split equally between the author and the publisher.
If the book was self-published, or if the publisher returned the rights to the author after the work went out of print, the author is supposed to receive the full amount. One crucial point is the date on which the rights were returned: the return must have occurred before August 10, 2022, for the author to claim 100% for the book, according to the settlement’s definition of the download date.
Repeated Claims and Errors in Records
The source reported complaints from authors who said publishers were claiming payments for works to which they no longer held the rights, or were claiming the entire amount even though they were entitled to no more than 50%. Author April Henry said HarperCollins filed a claim concerning a book whose rights, she said, had returned to her at least 17 years earlier. On the same day, a notice also appeared adding the publisher as her employer, which she denied.
Victoria Strauss of the Writers Beware blog said that the complaints she received repeated the same patterns. However, she declined to interpret them as a deliberate attempt to seize authors’ money, noting that poor recordkeeping could explain some of them and that some publishers had acknowledged errors and asked Anthropic to correct them.
Similarly, Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of Authors Guild, said she did not see, in the available facts, evidence of a deliberate campaign against authors, but rather an expected result of inaccurate records and a complicated settlement. Strauss, by contrast, believed that the unusual number of reports over a short period and the recurrence of the same errors could point to a broader problem than the routine individual glitches of a massive process.
What Does This Mean for Authors?
The objections are not limited to publishers. According to Strauss, she received complaints about literary agencies filing claims as well, even though agents are not the rights holders in the books they sell. Courtney Milan and Authors Guild shared additional details about how to challenge the allocation of payments.
The case demonstrates in practice that the settlement’s value does not automatically ensure that money reaches the correct rights holders. Authors need to review the status of each work, particularly the date on which rights were returned, and then use the objection process when there is a competing claim. The open question is whether the errors will remain isolated, correctable cases or reflect a systemic flaw in managing rights data within the settlement.