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