Good news and bad news about that copyright lawsuit I’m part of.
Since writing a post last month about my participation in the huge copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, there have been a few developments.
First, a settlement was reached between the plaintiffs and Anthropic. A big settlement: $1.5 billion to be paid to affected authors. This came out to $3,000 per infringed work. Whoa.
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 Surely all of those books were so sorely out of date that even an AI wouldn’t be interested in them.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 experience a grueling travel day thanks to automated systems and basic ineptitude at American Airlines.
I’ll try to make this short, mostly because I’m exhausted and don’t want to spend too much time writing about it. But it was such a crazy experience that I want to record it for posterity.
I just finished a two week delivery/training boat captain gig in Florida. The owner of the boat, a 2024 Beneteau Antares 11, needed to move the boat from Niceville on the Florida panhandle to Jacksonville on the northeastern Florida coast, a distance of more than 800 nautical miles. John had zero boating experience and his insurance company required an experienced training captain on board. John found me through my YouTube Great Loop videos. We had 2 weeks to do the trip and we managed with a day to spare.
There’s a lot more to this story, but I’ll cover the highlights in my Great Loop blog. All I can say is that I don’t know how people can live with the heat and humidity in Florida in August.
I ease back into writing for hire.
One of the things I’ve been working on part-time for past few years is getting back into writing articles for publication.
Although I thought I had a working relationship with Waterway Guide, that fizzled out pretty quickly. The publisher was initially excited about working with me and made some suggestions about how much money I might earn writing for them. I did my part to help build content on their site with a never-ending stream of marina and anchorage reviews. (I still get the occasional compliment for my reviews.)
But after months on the Loop, I just got one article assignment — and I never got paid for it. I was very interested in helping to update the Skipper Bob books — especially the one for the Erie Canal — but was told other people were doing it. No other work was forthcoming. So I stopped writing reviews. I’m a professional writer, after all, and I’m not going to go out of my way to build content for a for-profit publication without getting compensation for my work.
I think there are two reasons this time, one familiar and one new.
Let’s face it: I’ve been blogging at An Eclectic Mind since long before it had that name. My first blog post was way back in 2003. The blog had my name back then, Maria Langer, and it could be found at MariaLanger.com — where it can still be found; try it! I wrote about the things that were on my mind. For a while, I wrote computer-related how-to content, but I eventually broke that out and put it into a site called Maria’s Guides which I’ve since allowed to die. I wrote a lot about politics. I wrote a lot about my work and my play. I wrote a lot about my crazy divorce. I wrote a lot about social media. I wrote a lot about building a new life in Washington State.
Heck, I just wrote a lot about anything that was on my mind.
And that’s what I personally think a blog is for. At least this blog.
There are no ads here. No tracking. No annoying pop-ups begging you to subscribe or send me money. It’s just the blog of a writer — a person who has always written — sharing what’s on her mind.
If you come here often to read my latest and actually like a lot of what you read, great! I’m thrilled to have you here!
But if you stumbled in here unknowingly and have concluded that this blog is crap and a total waste of your time, well, just go away and don’t come back. It doesn’t bother me.
And if you think that’s harsh, well blame social media. (Also understand that “go away” is not what I originally wrote.)