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John Carlos Baez
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

Hey, Anthropic owes me $9000! They illegally used at least 3 of my books on LibGen to create Claude. Now they're paying a $1.5 billion settlement, at $3000 per book. See if *your* books are on the list:

https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/

If so, you have until March 23, 2026 to file a claim. The above website lets you file a claim, but this one explains everything more clearly:

https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/what-authors-need-to-know-about-the-anthropic-settlement/#next-steps

Actually I exaggerated: the payment will be split between authors and publishers - so the settlement is making me do some work my publisher should be doing for me. My coauthors and I will just get half, $4500. One of these books has 2 coauthors, one has 3, and one is a book I edited, with essays by lots of authors. So $1000 is a more realistic estimate of what I get. Oh well.

Bizarrely, my most popular book, Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity, is not on the list. But I guess it's not surprising:

"The settlement agreement discloses that approximately 500,000 titles out of the 7 million copies of books that Anthropic reportedly downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi meet the definition required to be part of the class."

I don't know what that definition is, and why it excludes most of the books.

The Authors Guild

What Authors Need to Know About the $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement

Updated October 2, 2025 IMPORTANT: The Works List Is Now Live on the Settlement Website The searchable Works List and Claim Forms are now available at www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com. Find more info here and below. Background  Bartz v. Anthropic is one of the […]
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Simon Tatham
@simontatham@hachyderm.io replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

@johncarlosbaez ANTHROPIC CLAUDE is an anagram of DO UNETHICAL CRAP

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ploum
@ploum@mamot.fr replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

@johncarlosbaez : but by accepting the money, you validate their use of your book, right?

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Charlie Stross
@cstross@wandering.shop replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

@johncarlosbaez @gnoll110 in my case, it's 29 books. The truncated settlement cash—minus publisher's cut—if it arrives is in the same order of magnitude as five years' backlist royalty payments (not counting the current year's book).

I want those fuckers to do serious jail time for theft pour encourager les autres, not pay a fine and skate.

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Michael Hartle
@mhartle@mastodon.online replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

@johncarlosbaez Is this a compensation for them using your work illegally, barring them from further use and keeping you in control, or a compensation that "retroactively licenses" usage of your work in Anthropics current and future LLMs?

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foldworks
@foldworks@mathstodon.xyz replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

@johncarlosbaez To qualify, the downloaded works need to have been registered with the US Copyright Office before being downloaded.

Unsurprisingly, many authors outside the US did not register their US copyright as registration is not needed in other countries (or their publisher could/should have registered the copyright but didn't). It costs about 50 USD per work.

Copyright exists as soon as the work is created, but US registration is needed for US statutory damages. Without registration, there is a higher bar to receive statutory damages. (AFAIK, only the US requires copyright registration like this).

As said elsewhere, this case is about Anthropic downloading from a shadow library -- training AI with copyrighted works appears to be fair use, so far.

US copyright history would make an interesting (but different) post.

(edited for clarity)
#copyright #Anthropic

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