Published Authors: AI Might Owe You Money!
As I wrote before in a previous post, AI has been a mess for authors, publishers, and copyright law. But there has been some progress.
Last year a copyright lawsuit against generative AI became the largest copyright settlement in US history. Dave Hansen explained it this way on the Kluwer Copyright Blog:
In August 2024, three authors—Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson—filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude language models. They claimed Anthropic had downloaded millions of copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) to train its AI systems.
Court documents showed Anthropic downloaded over 7 million books from these pirate sites, in part to use as training data for its AI development. It also bought and scanned millions more for the same purpose.
The judge in this case, Judge William Alsup, determined that while training AI with legally acquired books was legal, downloading and keeping pirated copies was not fair use and amounted to infringement. Later, Judge Alsup determined the case a class action, “defining the class to include ‘all beneficial or legal copyright owners of the exclusive right to reproduce copies of any book’ in the… datasets that met his criteria” (quoted from the same article).
What This Means for You
As Stephanie Chandler wrote in a Nonfiction Authors Association newsletter: “If you’ve published a book in recent years, there is a good chance your intellectual property was violated.”
The settlement’s terms require Anthropic to compensate claimants (affected authors who submit a valid claim) around $3,100 per work. This amount could increase if not all rightsholders make claims. The terms also require Anthropic to destroy the pirated libraries and any derivative copies within 30 days of the final judgment.
If you published a book before August 25, 2025, search this database to see if your book is listed. If it is, you can file a claim here. To learn more, visit the Anthropic Copyright Settlement Website.
I hope your book isn’t listed, but if it is, I hope you get a fat check in the mail soon!
(Special thanks to Stephanie Chandler at the Nonfiction Authors Association for alerting members on this development.)
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