I spent most of my business computer hours today looking through books I have published and seeing if they are on the Anthropic database of books included in the settlement.

To be included, the copyright on the book had to be registered before a certain date and then the book had to have been found by Anthropic on a pirate site so they could take it and use it to train an AI. In other words, not only did they steal author’s work, but they stole them from a pirate site. Pure class act, along with all the other thieves who stole books and art and also anyone who uses them. Just scum.

The settlement was for $3000 or so per title, way under basic copyright infringement levels. But this is easy so Kris and I did not opt out.

Two classes of people who can claim. This is their definition.

A legal owner of a work holds the exclusive right to publish and reproduce that work. Often, the legal owner of a work is the publisher because it holds the right to reproduce by contract.

A beneficial owner of a work is a former legal owner who assigned the exclusive right to publish and reproduce the work to another person or entity in exchange for royalty payments. Often, book authors are beneficial owners.

Mostly, of course, Kris and I are beneficial owners. Although with Pulphouse and with WMG we are also legal owners of a few titles. The amount of money paid out of the 1.5 billion settlement per title will depend on if there is more than one claim against the title. Publisher files and author files, both get $1,500 (or so, yes, I know the fees and such. Just keeping the math easy.)

We have about 80 novels or so under various names in the database, novels that were stolen.

However, those are the easy ones. We have both sold hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of short stories to anthologies edited by a ton of different editors.

Right now, I have found another 40 books that I have stories in that the anthologies are in the data base. Kris has more than that by a ways. Those are really difficult to find at times.

For example, I sold stories to the great writer Esther Friesner for his series Chick’s n Chainmail. I just found my copy of “Chicks and Balances” which both Kris and I have stories in. And a copy of “More Stories from the Twilight Zone” edited by Carol Serling. The data base can find books by author or editor name, book title, or sometimes publisher, or ISBN if you weirdly enough might have that. I had forgotten I had sold stories to both of those fine editors at one point or another.

Another example. I have a story in “Star Trek: The Amazing Stories” with no editor, but has my real name on the cover and on the story my pen name D.W. “Prof” Smith. If I hadn’t stumbled across a copy of that, I never would have found it in a search since my name, either one of them, does not show up in the search. Just the title and publisher.

The amount per story per anthology will be determined on how many author’s file by the deadline and so on. So if a publisher of an anthology files, editor files, four authors file, chances are the $3,000 base per title will get divided by 6 or about $500 per story. (Again, just keeping the math simple.)

I was kind of stunned that on some anthologies, over half the authors are dead, many of the editors are dead, and a large share of the writers in the “what ever happened to” group. And even more fun, over half the publishers are gone now as well. So no telling what will happen per title.

Kris and I are going to have well over two hundred titles when we are done on our claim forms.

We have no expectations of getting paid for the theft of our work, but it is worth the four or five hours it will take us to file the forms just to be a part of it.