Ka-ching!

Being in a class action is weird. You are part of a big, headline-making legal case, but not really.

I put my hand up to join the class action against Anthropic for stealing a bunch of my copyrighted works after being alerted to it by a couple of writer friends and a publishing newsletter I subscribe to. Even signing on was kind of nerve-wracking because the whole process is online. You’re not going into a legal office and shaking hands with a lawyer. You’re not signing any contracts in person. Because the whole thing is online—and because there are tens of millions of dollars at stake—it is, of course, a honeypot for scammers and criminals.

So every time I get an email from the firm that is running the class action, I have to jump through about six fiery hoops to confirm that it is actually from them and not from some Albanian criminal organisation that’s set up a front company to harvest the payouts for, presumably, tens of thousands of writers.

There were five of my books in the database used by Anthropic to build out the models for Claude. There should’ve been a lot more, but my publishers didn’t do their due diligence in registering the copyright with the U.S. Library of Congress, so I missed out on all of that. Even so, the payout could be a pretty good payday. Although whether that has to be split with all of the publishers who could claim they have an interest in it (even though they didn’t do the basic fucking work of registering the copyright for all of the other books I published with them) I can’t say.

As I mentioned above, it’s weird. So I’ve just put my hand up and said, “Gimme all the money you think I’m owed. If you think somebody else is owed some money, maybe pay them too. But I definitely want to get paid!”

We’ll see how that works out.