Did that title get your attention? Because it certainly got mine.

Many of you may be aware of the historic 1.5 billion dollar settlement  of copyright infringement claims in the Anthropic class action lawsuit. Anthropic essentially took books and articles from the pirate site, LibGen, to train their AI model. A LOT of books and articles. Fiction, non-fiction, scientific journals, you name it.

Library Genesis claims to be a shadow site offering “free” copies of all your favorite works, ie it’s a pirate site where thousands of documents and copyrighted works have been illegally made available. LibGen maintains it exists for the furthering of scientific information by making scholarly documents available for free. 

Sure, Jan. 

Earlier this year, it was announced that a settlement at been reached, and that authors whose work had been appropriated could apply for their share of the payout. I did the search: 15 of my titles (under 3 different pen names) had been used by Anthropic. According to the terms of the settlement, as an independent author, I was owed three thousand dollars for each book used to train Anthropic’s AI system. Traditionally published authors would receive the difference split 50-50 with their publishers.

15 books at $3K a pop comes to $45K in restitution.

But here’s the catch: all works had to be registered with the US copyright office in order to qualify. Now technically, the act of publishing something automatically confers copyright on your work. Copyright registration varies depending on the project but my works would have run about $45 per book. 

And I didn’t do it. I believed what I was told, that the act of publishing my books alone were sufficient as copyright, and I didn’t need that additional step–or cost. Frankly, it was an error on my part as a newly independent author, but it turns out a lot of pretty famous writers discovered that their Big Name Publishers hadn’t registered their works either!

I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse. All I know is I am going to see if I can retroactively register my existing works now, and I will be paying that registration fee on everything moving forward from here on out.

I don’t even want to think about what a difference $45K would have made to my life right now. I’d have rather not had my books stolen to create AI slop in the first place.