So today I filed the paperwork— actually an online form— claiming my share of the Anthropic settlement.
Anthropic is an company which has trained its AI, called Claude, on vast numbers of books, song lyrics, and other stolen copyrighted matter, and which has now offered its victims $1.5 billion in compensation— the largest copyright case in history. Each individual violation of copyright will earn the creator $3000 plus interest.
There is a page where you can find out whether your work has been scraped by Criminal Claude, and if it has, will lead you to another page where you can file your claim.
According to the page no less than 27 of my works were victimized. There’s one work that has nothing to do with me, (the author has a similar name), and one of my books was entered twice, but that still left me with 25 books and stories.
So this afternoon I diligently sat down to type all this information into an online form. Title, author, publisher, ISBN, copyright registration number, whether I hold the rights solely or with others, and whether it’s an educational publication.
It’s a slog, and I found out that once I began I couldn’t save the page and continue later. I had to add all 25 entries, and only then would the page allow itself to be saved. I found this out when I was trying to click to another tab— probably to find the ISBN of the novel I was working on— I accidentally clicked on the X of the tab I was on. The page vanished, and there was no way to get it back. I’d halfway finished the job, and now i had to re-enter all that information.
It took all afternoon, and by the end my body was a mass of cramp and pain.
But hey! There will be compensation, right? $1.5 billion is pocket change compared to the profits Anthropic expects Claude to earn them, but at least it’ll buy me a few nice toys.
And more settlements on the horizon! All the large-language models learned their writerly chops from real writers, and without compensation. With Anthropic having settled, that’s more pressure for others to fall in line.
Personally I would like to see the AI companies all burst into flame and tumble screaming into the void, but if that doesn’t happen I can console myself with my token payments.
If you’re a victim, you have till the end of the month to file the paperwork. Get busy!
