Authors expecting payments from Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement are discovering that publishers and literary agencies are making claims on money that should belong entirely to them. The dispute centers on two problems: publishers claiming payments for books where rights have reverted, and publishers seeking full payment when they are only entitled to half.
How the settlement works
Anthropic settled a copyright class action last year after a judge ruled that training AI models on copyrighted material is legal under fair use, but pirating that material is not. The settlement received final approval in July, clearing the way for payments to the authors of nearly 500,000 pirated titles. Each pirated work pays $3,000.
The split depends on the book's status. If a book is still in print with a traditional publisher, the payment is split 50-50 between author and publisher. If the book was self-published, or if the publisher reverted the rights by allowing the book to go out of print, the author receives the full payment. The key date for rights reversion is August 10, 2022, the download date specified in the settlement. To claim 100%, the reversion had to happen before that date.
What authors are reporting
Writers have been posting on social media about publishers claiming more than their fair share. Mystery and thriller author April Henry reported that HarperCollins claimed one of her books that reverted at least 17 years ago, and that the claim appeared on the same day HarperCollins was added as her employer in the system, a designation she says is incorrect.
Victoria Strauss at the Writers Beware blog said she has received complaints in two broad categories. Publishers are seeking payment for works where they no longer have a legitimate claim because the rights reverted. Publishers are also seeking full 100% payments when they are only entitled to 50%. Strauss said she is reluctant to attribute to malice what can be explained by poor recordkeeping, and that some publishers have acknowledged the errors and asked Anthropic to fix them.
Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told the New York Times that she does not see this as a grab by publishers. She argued it is the predictable result of bad recordkeeping and a confusing settlement process. But Strauss noted that the unusually large number of complaints and the fact that authors are reporting the exact same errors repeatedly suggest something more widespread than routine glitches.
Literary agencies making unexpected claims
Publishers are not the only ones seeking a cut. Strauss reported complaints about literary agencies also making claims on the settlement, which she called surprising since agents are not rightsholders in the books they sell. Author Courtney Milan was more direct, writing that agents trying to claim percentages on the Anthropic settlement should stop.
Agents typically earn commissions on sales, not on copyright settlements. The settlement is a payment for pirated use of copyrighted material, which is a right that belongs to the author or the publisher who holds the rights, not to the agent who facilitated the original sale. Whether agents have any legitimate claim under the settlement terms is a question that has not been resolved publicly.
What authors can do
The Authors Guild and Courtney Milan have shared details about how authors can dispute their payment allocations. The process depends on the specifics of each case: whether the book was self-published, whether rights reverted, and when the reversion happened relative to the August 10, 2022 date.
The practical challenge is that many authors do not have clean records of when rights reverted, particularly for books that went out of print years ago. Publishers may have better records, or they may not. The settlement process requires authors to assert their claims, and publishers to assert theirs, and the system appears to be handling the volume poorly.
For authors waiting on settlement payments, the immediate step is to check whether a publisher or agency has made a claim on their work. If a claim is incorrect, the dispute process exists, but it requires documentation that may be hard to produce for books that reverted rights a decade or more ago. The settlement was designed to compensate authors for pirated use of their work. Whether it actually does that depends on whether the payment allocation process works as intended, and the early reports suggest it is not.