Tag: Victoria Strauss

Reblog: Anthropic Settlement — Writer Beware

Writer Beware has long been a great resource for writers, calling out outright scams, questionable services, and bad publishers. Lately, they’ve been following the ongoing saga of the class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, and the proposed settlement.

For those who aren’t aware, the settlement revolves around Anthropic’s use of illegally downloaded works of fiction in training it’s LLM models. So while AI and copyright are involved, this is strictly about the means of acquisition and not around the training itself.

The number of books involved is staggering. Only holders of registered copyrights were allowed to participate in the settlement, but this still amounts to roughly 400,000 books. The maximum possible penalties would be $150,000 per case of infringement. In actuality, the settlement will be closer to $3,000 each, which might seem pretty weak in comparison, but still amounts to 1.5 billion dollars, by far the largest copyright-related settlement in history.

As of this week, the settlement has been approved by the judge, which means it’s very likely to go forward and the numbers are unlikely to change in a significant way.

There are also still a handful of authors who opted out of the settlement and have already filed lawsuits separately, presumably in hopes of getting an amount closer to that $150k maximum.  So the finalization of the settlement doesn’t mean Anthropic’s woes are over for this particular case. And beyond that, there are dozens of other lawsuits against the big LLM companies still pending.

Check out these recent posts at Writer Beware for more details:

Anthropic Settlement: Final Settlement Approved

Anthropic Settlement: The Opt Outs Strike Back

Reblog: The Anthropic Class Action Settlement — Writer Beware

As usual, Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware has some of the best coverage of the Anthropic settlement. If you haven’t been watching this lawsuit, the court determined that Anthropic’s AI training falls under fair use, but its illegal downloading of millions of books from pirating websites does not.

Anthropic apparently felt it was too risky and expensive to see the case to completion, with the real possibility of a judgement that falls close to the maximum statutory penalty of $150,000 per pirated work. That payout for even a fraction of the millions of books starts to look like the GDP of a small country. So they settled.

The settlement in this class action will likely grant a payout of roughly $3,000 per claimed work, but with a number of caveats. It only applies to works with proper copyright registration, currently estimated at around 500,000 books. The lawyers will get paid, and for books with a publisher who still holds rights, the publisher will also typically get about half.

If you think your work might be included, check the links from the article. There is an easy search function to see if your work was identified as pirated.

Writer Beware — The Anthropic Class Action Settlement

Unfortunately, many authors will be excluded due to the copyright registration requirement. Many self-published works, and even those with lazy “professional” publishers who never bothered to register their copyright cannot participate. For those who can, it will be months (and maybe longer) before any money sees the light of day.

Victoria also notes that this potentially record-breaking settlement is attracting the scavengers and parasites of the legal world.

Writer Beware — Predatory Opt Outs: The Speculators Come for the Anthropic Copyright Settlement

At least one law firm has targeted authors in the settlement class, trying to convince them to give up their right to participate in exchange for potential future lawsuits and the vague hope of a payout closer to the $150,000 maximum. Participants in the current lawsuit are already complaining that these advertisements and the website backing them amount to outright fraud.

Of course, the current settlement is just about guaranteed to pay something if you’re a qualifying author, and there is absolutely no guarantee that anyone opting out will get a better deal. This is a prime example of trading a bird in the hand for two in the bush.

That said, the current settlement terms are a lot less than many authors were hoping for. Part of the class-action structure gives legal right to any qualifying authors to opt out of the settlement if they have reason to think they can somehow get a better deal.

There are at least 50 other lawsuits pending against the big AI companies over copyright issues, and it’s quite possible that we haven’t heard the last word on the fair use issue, even if it’s not looking good so far for authors’ and publishers’ rights. Judging by the haphazard and questionable ways many of these companies have scraped the internet for training data, there may still be more big payouts yet to come.

Reblog: Contract Controversy (and Change) at Must Read Magazines — Writer Beware

I feel very out of the loop.

Apparently some of the longest-running genre fiction magazines still in print were bought up by a single entity at the start of the year: Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Unfortunately, print magazines feel like a relic of the past, and even though sci-fi/fantasy has managed better than most fiction markets, it’s a tough business to be in.

There is some hope, as the group that now owns these magazines at least claims to be in it for the love of the fiction and the community, and not just to leech the remaining value like most private equity. Still, simply combining several similar magazines under one operation probably isn’t enough to keep things profitable. It appears that part of the strategy will be to try to leverage stories and IPs beyond magazines. This is at the heart of recent contract controversies, with the company using some pretty broad legal language.

Twenty years ago, when I was first getting serious about writing, these magazines were the most prestigious places a sci-fi/fantasy author could place their story. They are now sadly diminished, but some of that prestige still lingers. Let’s hope that they can find ways to keep the lights on without taking advantage of their writers and tarnishing the reputations that made them so beloved.

Check out the full article at the link below.

Contract Controversy (and Change) at Must Read Magazines