Anthropic Copyright Settlement: Publishers Are Making Incorrect Claims on Authors’ Payouts

This week, many authors who are part of the Anthropic copyright class action settlement began receiving notices like this one: Upon accessing the portal (which doesn’t seem to have a formal name, so I’ll call it the “disgreement portal”), many of those authors made an unwelcome discovery: their publishers are making claims on their allocations (aka the payouts for their works) that are simply…wrong. (Just to note, since several people have asked me this: as far as I know, you only get a notice if there’s a disagreement. So if, like me, you haven’t received anything, there’s no disagreement and nothing you need to do.) Wrongful Claims Just to refresh: per the stipulations of the settlement, authors who’ve self-published, or whose contracts have terminated, or who have reverted the rights to their published books, can claim 100% of the allocation. The publisher isn’t entitled to a share. For in-print books, the settlement imposes a 50/50 split (the “default split”) between author and…