On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway reports that the judge in the Anthropic case has approved the settlement process, confirming 482,000 eligible titles with payments split 50/50 between authors and publishers. He clarifies that Spotify’s new terms do not affect creators, celebrates L. J. Ross’s shortlist nomination at the UK Speakies audiobook awards, and notes that TikTok’s US operations will move to a US-run consortium, securing BookTok’s future.
Listen to the Podcast: Anthropic Settlement Moves Forward
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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.
Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to the first Self-Publishing News podcast from the brand-new Stephen A. Schwartzman Center for the Humanities in the University of Oxford, which is the new home to all things humanities here in Oxford. So, very pleased to be greeting you all from a new location. Inevitably, there are some hiccups including hiccups with internet, so I apologize for any tech issues or sound issues for the next week or so.
Anthropic Case Update
Dan Holloway: What I promised you, first of all, was news from the hearing at the end of last week in the Anthropic case. The news there is that the judge seems to be content that all questions that were intended to be answered or were desired to be answered, have indeed been answered satisfactorily.
So, the hearing you'll remember was basically the result of a process where the parties who had agreed on a settlement, which would see a payment of $3,000 per pirated title that Anthropic had downloaded from Library Genesis or Pirate Library Mirror. They had agreed that the judge had sent them away to do more homework, basically to create a more accurate data set on the number of authors who were involved in this, the number of titles that were involved in this, and convincing the judge that adequate steps were in place to enable authors to find out whether they were part of the class.
That's the key bit for people listening today, I'm guessing, because if you remember, there were forms that had to be filled out, or forms that the plaintiff's lawyers were asking people to fill out to register interest in being part of the class. It turns out that, as a result of those efforts, the court has contact addresses for 279,000 titles and their authors.
The agreement that the judge is happy with about the class has identified a total of 482,000 titles, so that means, I think the percentage was that 58% of all the titles in the class are the authors of those titles, the court will contact.
But, and this is the other key piece of news, there is going to be a concerted publicity drive is, I think, how it was put, and I haven't seen any more details since.
So, a concerted publicity drive to make authors aware of the steps they need to take to find out if their titles are included in this class. So, that's where we stand at the moment. So, originally, I think 7 million titles had been identified as possibly being eligible, that has been whittled down to 482,000, largely because of copyright not being registered with the US Copyright Office.
This, as I've reported before, has caused some considerable difficulties between authors and their publishers when they've found out that their publishers hadn't done what they thought they might have done.
Obviously, for indie authors, you will know whether you registered with the US Copyright Office or not.
So, you should have a much clearer picture of whether you are likely to be in that 482,000 that will constitute the class, but there will be more publicity to tell you what to do, to find out for sure whether you are on that database. So, a database is available, and I think will be searchable and details will come out of how to search it.
The other interesting thing that came out of the case was that it seems that the 50/50 split between authors and publishers that had been suggested in the settlement has been approved by the court. So, for those of you who are hybrid and have traditional publishing deals, the arrangement will be that for trade and university press titles, 50/50 is what is going to be split.
So, authors will get $1,500, and publishers will also get $1,500. For educational titles, there will be more ad hoc deals. So, that's the latest on the Anthropic case.
Spotify's Terms of Use Clarification
Dan Holloway: There is another latest that is the other main news this week, and that is on Spotify.
Spotify changed their terms of use recently. There was a lot of worry because that change in terms of use gave them the right to use uploaded content in various ways. Authors, musicians, creatives, have been very concerned that this was a rights grab by Spotify.
There have been loud enough noises made in prominent enough parts of the internet that Spotify last week issued a statement to clarify the position, and their clarification is that the terms of use change does not apply to creators.
So, it's not a change in terms of use for authors or for musicians. This is entirely about things that have been uploaded by listeners who, for example, had uploaded custom art to their playlists to create covers and so on. So, it is not the case that terms of use for Spotify have changed for creators.
So, I hope that's a case of the news isn't actually the news.
Speakies Awards Announcement
Dan Holloway: And to end with something even more positive, last week saw the announcement of the first shortlist for the Speakies Awards. The Speakies is the UK equivalent of the very widely known Audies, which is the Association of Audio Publishers Awards based in the States.
It has lots of the same categories, and the good news is that indie legend, LJ Ross, has been shortlisted for Panic, which is the fifth in her Alexander Gregory series of thrillers. So, huge congratulations to LJ, and I very much hope that I will be reporting on a victory for her come November when the winners are announced.
TikTok and BookTok News
Dan Holloway: To round up on a couple of other pieces: TikTok. So, TikTok hasn't been in the news much since January. Other than that, every couple of months or so, the deadline for divestment from ByteDance for the US version of TikTok, the deadline gets extended.
Now it seems that an executive order has been signed in the US approving the transfer of TikTok's US operation to a US-run consortium, and it's a consortium that seems to involve major players like Oracle, who are going to be providing the security for the service and venture capitalists like, I think, Andrees and Horowitz are involved. Apparently, President Xi Jinping of China has approved this.
So, it looks like all the fabulous sessions on BookTok that you are going to be attending come the SelfPubCon in a couple of weeks’ time, that ALLi is running, if you're based in the US, they will not be futile after all. There is still a future in connecting with readers through the BookTok community. So, that will be positive news for all of those of you who have set your stall there and maybe give some certainty for the future.
With that, I look forward to speaking to you again in our future at the same time next week. Thank you very much.
