On this week's Self-Publishing News podcast, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway brings two updates on the Anthropic settlement: an appeal by the class lawyers over their reduced fees that could considerably delay the $3,000-per-title payouts, and an Authors Guild survey finding that 93 percent of publishers contractually required to register copyrights failed to do so — a problem that reaches well beyond indie authors. He closes with Google Play Books' new Expert Intelligence feature, an AI tool trained only on books readers have purchased.
Listen to the Podcast: Lawyers' Appeal Could Delay Anthropic Payouts
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello, and welcome to another week of self-publishing news. And I am back from a little break at the Mind Sports Olympiad in London, where I have been taking part in the Creative Thinking World Championships. I was absolutely delighted to win for the sixth time at my very favorite event ever, and there is a literary connection.
So to get your creative juices going and to have a bit of fun, one of the questions asked to find similarities or links between asparagus, palmistry, and Winnie-the-Pooh. And so there we go. We can all have some Winnie-the-Pooh-related fun. And because, as you well know, Winnie-the-Pooh is now out of copyright, you can talk freely about whatever answers you may wish.
Lawyers' Appeal Could Delay Anthropic Payouts
And talking of copyright, that brings us to the main news. So there are two sort of updates on the Anthropic payout story, and I will start with the very biggest one of those, which is that there is an appeal, and that could delay payment to all of you who are eligible as part of the $1.5 billion class in the class action there.
The appeal, interestingly, has not come from Anthropic. It has come from lawyers. Who would have thought? Again, if one wants some literary references, it might be time to have another read of Bleak House if we want to know about lawyers and how they like to delay things. So you will remember that one of the reasons that, even though so many eligible titles — nearly half a million — came forward, the payout still remained at the level of $3,000 per title was because judges in the case not once, but twice, reduced the amount of legal fees that would be taken from the $1.5 billion pool.
And it is that that lawyers are appealing about. So you'll remember that the judge essentially said there wasn't very much for the lawyers to do, certainly not enough to justify the many, many hundreds of millions of dollars that they were claiming, and so reduced the amount considerably — I think in the end to somewhere around 10 percent of the total pot or a little above — which is much less than is normally the case in class actions like this.
And so the lawyers have taken umbrage with that and are appealing the amount of the total pool that is awarded to lawyers. So there we go. If this goes to a full appeal — and this is something that Jane Friedman has some interesting thoughts about — then this is likely to delay payment of monies due considerably, so that is not good news.
Authors Guild Survey Finds Publishers Failed to Register Copyrights
Something else that is not particularly good news that is related to the Anthropic case is a survey from the Authors Guild around registration of copyright. And you will remember, again, that one of the key issues in deciding the eligibility of the titles in the class action was whether they had been registered with the US Copyright Office in a timely fashion.
There were all sorts of arguments about this. One of the objections in the case, which was overruled, was that copyright law doesn't actually require registration with the Copyright Office. Nonetheless, the judge decided that registration with the Copyright Office would be required for titles to be eligible for being part of this class.
And that obviously is potentially going to have significant effects on future classes. And it is something which hit indie authors particularly hard, because it is a large cost for us as individuals to register every title with the Copyright Office. As you will also know, the Copyright Office is seeking to raise its fees for registering a single title, so it is gonna become even more expensive to do.
It is also administratively burdensome, and it is therefore not something that many indie authors do. But what the Authors Guild survey has found is confirmation of what was suspected at the time, which is that those authors who are traditionally published are also finding that many of their publishers have not registered their titles with the Copyright Office, even though it was in their contract that they should do so.
So that is something that has obviously caused a lot of annoyance to a lot of authors who thought they were gonna be part of the eligible class, found out they weren't, because their publishers, who had said they were going to register copyright, hadn't done so. So, this survey took in 1,400 books written by 500 authors.
In well over half of the cases, their contract included registration of copyright, so that was something that publishers were required to do. Yet in 93 percent of cases, publishers hadn't done that, so this thing is not just a historic issue. So 321 of those cases from 2019 onwards — so the most recent five years, I think that is, for this survey that was carried out — had not registered the copyright of titles that they had said they were going to.
The survey and the Authors Guild are very keen to point out that this is not adequate information to prove that there has been a contractual breach in any of these cases. So it's very much a survey, it's indicative, but nonetheless, it is very alarming. So this is clearly not just an issue that is affecting indies, it's an issue that is affecting authors everywhere, and if eligibility for payouts in AI-related cases and other cases of copyright infringement is going to require registration with the Copyright Office, then a lot of people who thought they were covered might not be covered, and a lot of people are potentially going to miss out.
Google Play Books Launches Expert Intelligence
So, yeah, two fairly big stories that are related to the Anthropic case. And those are the main bits of news this week. We also have some news from Google. So Google Play Books is launching a new function. It is called Expert Intelligence. And it is probably one of those sort of oxymoronic things.
It is therefore possibly, you might say likely, to be neither expert nor intelligent. What it is, is a function which basically lets you ask questions of the book. So that sounds to me somewhat like things like the story so far that you have in Amazon for its Kindle books. It is being touted by Google as being sort of this unique, groundbreaking thing.
I'm not sure it is, but what it does do, apparently — it's an AI feature, but it doesn't train itself. It is not trained in any way on content that has been scraped. It has not been trained on content that is not consented to, and is therefore not in any way, shape, or form ever going to breach copyright.
Instead, it is trained only on the content of the book in question, provided that the person who is asking questions of it owns the book. So it's only if you've already paid for a book that you can ask the questions through this feature about the book that you are reading, and apparently there are all sorts of other safeguards.
So, if you are collaborating with someone on a book, then the answers that you get to the question that you have asked it cannot be passed on to third parties without those third parties also owning a copy of the book. So it is designed to be PR-friendly, I think is the way I would describe it.
At the moment, it's for traditionally published nonfiction titles, but its creator, who is a fellow by the name of Steven Johnson, who works for Google, has suggested that it will or could very soon roll out to other titles, and those would include titles by indie authors. So there we go.
New tool from Google that is coming to indie books in the Google Play Books store soon. And with that, I look very much forward to seeing you and speaking with you again at the same time next week. Thank you.
