My Anthropic Copyright Claim

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

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?

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

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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Strike is Over…For Now

An Eclectic Mind and Maria’s Guides are back online.

Stop SOPA / PIPA
CC0 Image: KSimmulator

Yesterday, Wednesday, January 18, 2012, this blog, An Eclectic Mind, and my other main site, Maria’s Guides, went “on strike.” Like so many larger and more influential sites — such as Wikipedia, Craigslist, Reddit, and Boing Boing — I’d decided to help spread the word about the potential implications of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) by giving site visitors an idea of what things could be like if SOPA or PIPA became law. While I don’t claim that either I or this site have the ability to sway public opinion, I believe that a strike can be most effective when everyone participates. I was just doing my part.

(To be accurate, I need to point out that my sites were still accessible after seeing the initial information screen. I’ve worked very hard to build readership on The Eclectic Mind and Maria’s Guides and didn’t want to completely alienate visitors who were looking for specific information. (At least 75% of traffic to my sites comes from search engines.) But in order to see the content, visitors had to look at the Strike message and find the “Continue to Site” link. Or visit it more than once during the day. And judging from the site stats for the day, I can only assume that many people did not take that extra step — which doesn’t surprise me, given the extremely short attention spans of people these days.)

Amazingly, there are many Americans who don’t realize how SOPA and PIPA could affect them. And, as evidenced on Twitter yesterday, there are a surprising number of people who have never heard of either one. (If you’re one of these people, you might want to watch this video, which explains it using a whiteboard and a discussion of the actual wording of the legislation.)

So I’m glad I participated. I helped spread the word. I hope a lot of people did and that awareness for the potential problems was raised. With the participation of over 6,000 sites, I was one of many.

Did the January 18 Blackout/Strike help? This Forbes article certainly makes it seem as if it did. PC World confirms this. And Wikipedia reports lots of support from users.

But the fight is not over. Many Senators and members of Congress still support SOPA, PIPA, or both — including, embarrassingly, BOTH of the idiot Senators from my home state of Arizona. Although the vast majority of informed Americans area against SOPA/PIPA, our elected lawmakers apparently don’t remember who they are supposed to serve: the American people — not special interest groups. The only way they can be reminded is if we remind them — by contacting them and letting them know what we think.

I’m doing my part. Are you doing yours?

Because if this legislation passes, sites like mine — and so many others across the web — might go dark forever.

Stop SOPA/PIPA. Stop Internet censorship.