A number of authors awaiting their share of the $1.5 billion copyright settlement with Anthropic say they received surprising emails this week informing them that other parties had filed claims for a portion of their payments.
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Anthropic reached a settlement last year in a class-action lawsuit related to copyright, after a judge ruled that training AI models on copyrighted material can fall under fair use, but that obtaining that material through pirated means is not lawful.
The settlement received final approval in July, allowing the compensation payment process to begin.
Under the settlement's terms, authors of around 500,000 titles will receive $3,000 for each work that was pirated.
If a book is still in print with a traditional publisher, the amount is split evenly between the author and the publisher, 50% each. But if the book was self-published, or if the publisher returned the rights to the author after the book went out of print, the author is supposed to receive the full amount.
But writers have posted on social media saying some publishing houses appear to be claiming larger shares than they're entitled to from some of the payments.
For example, mystery and thriller novelist April Henry wrote, asking: "What the hell is HarperCollins doing? They claimed a share of one of my books in the Anthropic settlement, even though its rights reverted to me at least 17 years ago. And on the same day I received a credit notice listing them as an employer of mine, even though they never were."
On the well-known Writer Beware blog, Victoria Strauss wrote that she had received complaints from authors falling generally into two categories.
The first category involves publishers claiming compensation for works in which they no longer hold legal rights, since the rights reverted to the authors. The second category involves publishers claiming 100% of the compensation, when they are only entitled to 50%.
Strauss said she was "reluctant to interpret what could be explained by poor record-keeping as bad faith," noting that some publishers have already acknowledged errors and asked Anthropic to correct them.
Similarly, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, told The New York Times that she doesn't see what's happening as "an attempted grab by publishers," nor does she believe publishing houses are "deliberately trying to harm any author."
Instead, she viewed the problem as an expected result of poor record-keeping and the complexity of the settlement process.
Strauss also acknowledged that the complaints she's seen represent only "a view through a small crack in a huge wall."
But she added: "The unusually large number of reports I've received over the past two days, along with the fact that authors are reporting the same errors over and over, suggests to me that this isn't just routine errors one might expect in a process of this scale, but a broader, more systemic problem."
Claims for a share of the compensation aren't limited to publishers.
Strauss said she had also received complaints regarding a number of literary agencies that filed claims for shares of the settlement, which she described as surprising, since "agents are not rights holders in the books whose rights they handle the sale of."
Author Courtney Milan, the pen name of legal researcher and former law professor Heidi Bond, was sharper in a comment posted on Bluesky, writing: "It looks like some agents are trying to claim percentages of the Anthropic settlement, and I do not think for one second that they're entitled to do that. What the hell is this? Stop it."
Milan and the Authors Guild also posted further details on how authors can object to the way their payments are being distributed.
One complicating factor involves determining the date a given book's rights reverted to the author. For an author to be able to claim 100% of the compensation value for a book, the book's rights must have reverted to them before August 10, 2022, the date the settlement designated as the "download date" for the work.
