Beehiiv has been in the news again this past week. I want to report on the latest from the newsletter platform if for no other reason than an irresistible desire to say they have been busy little bees. A facility offering webinar capability will be of interest to some. But more interesting might be the so-called “metered paywall” capability. That's something many will be familiar with as readers, where you get a certain amount of content for free (say, three articles) before you have to pay to unlock more.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Anthropic Settlement Update
Meanwhile, following a brief hiatus, there is more news on the Anthropic settlement. The final class submission deadline was March 30. That is, holders of the rights of any of the 482,460 titles identified as being part of the class in the class action against Anthropic had until March 30 to come forward and therefore to be entitled to a payout from the $1.5 billion fund.
You will recall that the judge in the case had insisted that Herculean efforts be made by authors' groups and others to identify the potential claimants in the case. And the figures reported by the Authors Guild suggest that these efforts have paid off, with 440,490 of those eligible titles being claimed, or 91 percent of the total. Apparently this is a remarkably high percentage for a class action.
Payout Calculations
What this means is that we now have a very much better idea what the payout for each title will be, which is the part any of you who are part of the case will really want to know. The Authors Guild piece goes through some calculation and arrives at a base following deductions for legal and other fees of $2,931.
This is lower than the originally touted $3,000 settlement, though only just, and considerably lower than had been thought after the legal fees were reduced to their current level. The reason for that is the large number of claimants to have come forward at the last minute.
The final figure will likely be higher as the set-aside fund is already accumulating interest.
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