Category Archives: The Writing Life

Posts about writing for fun and profit.

My Anthropic Copyright Claim

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I file my claim in the Anthropic copyright case — and sit back to wait for the results.

I wrote about the Anthropic copyright case in three blog posts here, so I’m not going to go into the details again. If you want to get up to speed on my thoughts, read these:

My Claim

My infringed work
This is the official list of my work that Anthropic illegally accessed, violating copyright law.

The case went back and forth and it seemed for a while that the $3,000 per title settlement was not going to be accepted. But then it was and recently the legal team handling the claims for copyright holders including authors like me published the definitive list of infringed works. I used the lookup feature and found nine of my books.

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Copyright Basics

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The correct answers to your questions are pretty easy to find if you just look.

Making Trouble on Mastodon
Here’s my exchange with an angry self-published author. I’m not surprised that he’s blaming someone else for his problem; that seems to be a big trend these days.

Yesterday, I wrote an update to my August blog post about the Anthropic copyright case. In it, I mentioned that in order for a title to be included, it must be listed in the database of books Anthropic illegally obtained and used to train their AI and have its copyright registered with the US Copyright Office.

Apparently, it’s this second qualification that has a lot of authors freaking out — especially self-published authors. This came to light when I replied to an Ars Technica post on Mastodon — the same one I linked to in yesterday’s post. Yes, I was being flip, but I was also being honest. As someone who has books that qualify, I’ll definitely settle for $3,000 per qualifying title.

Apparently a lot of self-published authors have books that were illegally used by Anthropic but because they never bothered to register copyright of their work, they’re not eligible to receive compensation under this settlement. And they’re pissed.

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Is Any Book Really Dead These Days?

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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.

The Good News

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.

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Fighting Against AI Copyright Theft

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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.

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Getting Back to Writing

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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.

Waterway Guide

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.

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