I join the class action suit against Anthropic for the use of text in 16 of my books to train their AI without permission or compensation.
I didn’t expect to spend part of my morning filling in a form on a lawyer’s website to provide information about myself and the books Anthropic apparently used to train their AI. After all, I haven’t written much in the past 10 years and all of what I’d written before then was about using computers. Surely all of those books were so sorely out of date that even an AI wouldn’t be interested in them.
But here I am.
I’d heard about the lawsuit:
Bartz v. Anthropic PBC is a class action lawsuit under the Copyright Act brought by authors on behalf of copyright holders against Anthropic PBC, an AI company. The Class of copyright holders — consisting of authors and publishers – claims that Anthropic took books from pirate websites Library Genesis (“LibGen”) and Pirate Library Mirror (“PiLiMi”) without authorization.
The Court recently certified a LibGen & PiLiMi Pirated Books Class made up of all legal or beneficial owners of the exclusive right to reproduce any ISBN- or ASIN-bearing book that Anthropic copied from the two pirate sites. The Class’s claims are scheduled for trial on December 1, 2025.
The latest update to that is that the parties have apparently settled and money will be paid out to the 7 million authors affected by the theft. You can read about that in an article on Ars Technica.
This toot jump started this morning’s efforts to get myself on the list of authors affected by Anthropic’s theft of my copyrighted work.
I knew that the lawyers were looking for affected authors but didn’t do anything about it because I didn’t think I was an affected author. (See above.) But then Dave Mark on Mastodon posted a toot with a link to an Australian Website that had a link to an Atlantic website page with a tool for searching which books were used to train the AI. And yes, 16 of my books (plus some repetitions) were on it.
So I tracked down the article about it on the Author’s Guild website and clicked the big button to provide my contact information. That put me on the lawyers’ website where I could provide my contact info and list all 16 titles.
I’m done now and can get on with my day. I don’t expect to get much from this, but I do think it’s important that authors stand up for their rights — especially when money- and resource-hogging for-profit organizations are stealing our work to build systems to replace us.
If you’ve written any books in the past 20 years, I urge you to see if you’re on the list and take action if you are. Theft of our work has to stop. Let’s work together to protect our work and our livelihoods.
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I wonder if my publications re: journal and magazine articles would have been susceptible in this regard. Maybe the anthology series I was part of as well. To put it mildly, I’m extremely upset about AI’s impact not only with respect to copyright issues and putting people, like me, out of a job, but how it affects humanity — and what it means “to be human” — in general. It disturbs me beyond words. As made famous by a quote in the movie Ferris Bueller, “I weep for the future.” (Truly.)
I think this particular list just focused on books. If your work was part of a book, search for that. There’s a link in the blog post.
I’d honestly be surprised if I got more than $10, if that much. But if there are 7 million claimants and each one gets $10, that’s a $70 million hit on Anthropic. I’d like to see more of that. They need to be paying for the material that they use to train their systems.