Authors push back as publishers and agents make claims on Anthropic settlement

摘要: Some authors hoping to receive their share of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement said they received surprising emails this week — emails in

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Some authors hoping to receive their share of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement said they received surprising emails this week — emails informing them that someone else 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.

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 Henry

, “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).”

the popular blog Writers Beware

, Victoria Strauss wrote that she’s 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 they’re only entitled to 50%.

In both cases, Strauss said she’s “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’ve asked Anthropic to fix.

Similarly,

Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told The New

来源: TechCrunch AI