Thanks to Jane Friedman for pointing toward the Writer Beware piece that forms the basis for this week's first story. Class action lawsuits taken out by rights holders against tech companies for alleged violations related to copyright law committed in pursuit of the development of large generative AI models. That's a general description of what we've seen a lot in the news. And we will be seeing it a lot more.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
And for rights holders, especially those like indie authors who are doing a lot of their own lifting around this, there is a very simple question we want an answer to.
Am I a part of this class?
Because if so, that means we can start setting wheels in motion and at some point expect to receive some compensation. A lot of indie authors thought they were going to be in this position when the Atlantic shared a search tool for the database of pirated books in Library Genesis.
The Eligibility Problem
And that's where new levels of frustration have started to get layered over the initial anger at realizing what we probably already knew about our works having been pirated. Because if there's one thing that we've learned from the Anthropic case it's that not all pirated books are getting paid out as part of the class of pirated books. The judge in that case laid down the stipulation that titles must have been registered in a timely fashion with the US Copyright Office. The Writer Beware piece points out that while we think it impressive that 93 percent of the eligible class has come forward to stake a claim to payout, that word “eligible” is doing a lot of lifting. We know, per the article, that seven million titles were in the pirate libraries concerned, more than ten times the full eligible class.
The Meta Case and ISBNs
But the real focus of the piece is the subsequent class action filed by publishers against Meta. And one key difference between that and the Anthropic case.
The Anthropic class required eligible titles to have an ISBN or ASIN. The Meta case states that to be in the class, titles require an ISBN or ISSN (for journals). That is a huge difference. The former case already ruled out a lot of indie authors (and a surprising number with traditional deals) with the registration requirement. Excluding titles that only have an ASIN greatly increases the number excluded.
The last paragraph raises some existential questions for us, such as whether it now behooves us to purchase ISBNs for digital-only titles. I am not a lawyer and not qualified to answer that. I am also mindful of “timeliness” (or “has that ship sailed already?”). But the emergence of these class actions has raised new questions that we need to consider as we publish.
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