In October, a settlement was announced in the copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, providing authors of books they trained their AI on with compensation of around $3000. There were certain eligibility conditions, though.

One condition is that the book must have been registered with the US Copyright Office during the period in which Anthropic downloaded it. You can check whether yours is registered here. Traditionally, and usually by contract, publishers are responsible for registering books with the US Copyright Office.

At least one author has learned that her publisher failed to register her book, even though it was published several years ago. So it seems her publisher’s dawdling has cost her around $3000.

The publisher in question is Routledge, of the Taylor & Francis Group. The author is philosophy professor Sarah Paul (NYU Abu Dhabi). She writes:

I checked whether my book (which had been published before Anthropic’s downloading ended, and is on LibGen [a site scraped by Anthropic]) was registered, and it still isn’t. This is now 5 years after my book was published. I have no way of knowing whether Anthropic actually downloaded my book, but it is possible that my book was excluded from the settlement because the copyright was not registered.  Further, my contract with T&F states that they must register it:

“The Publishers will register the copyright in the Work in the name of the Publishers in compliance with the copyright law of the United States, and will publish the Work with a copyright notice in the name of the Publishers.”

I raised my concern with T&F that their failure to register the copyright could have cost me ~$3k.  I believe some other presses are actively seeking information for their authors about whether a failure to register the copyright was the reason for exclusion, and if so, are compensating their authors accordingly.  I suggested that this is something T&F could also do.  I waited 8 weeks for an official response, but eventually got nothing other than an offer to register my copyright now, “if I would like.”

This is infuriatingly irresponsible behavior from Taylor & Francis, capped by an infuriating irresponsible reply. Authors may wish to keep this in mind next time they’re considering publishing a book with Routledge or any of T&F’s other imprints.

In the meanwhile, Professor Paul is curious whether other authors are in a similar position of having been excluded from the settlement owing to publishers failing to register the copyright of their works (be it Taylor & Francis or another publisher). If so, please let us know in the comments. She adds, “Perhaps some action could be taken together, if there are enough of us.”