On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway opens 2026 by looking at newly released public domain works, including titles by Agatha Christie, T. S. Eliot, and other major crime and literary writers, and what authors should watch for when reusing characters and stories. He also reports on the launch of the Copy Might Coalition, a new effort to support indie authors in AI-related copyright disputes and collective licensing, and examines a fresh legal challenge to the Anthropic settlement that raises questions about how the value of books is judged in AI training cases.
Listen to the Podcast: Public Domain Opens New Doors
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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 a very, very happy New Year. Welcome to the first Self-Publishing News podcast of 2026. One of the things you might be doing in 2026 is exploring and playing with new works that are entering the public domain. This is one of the fun things that happens every year — new works enter the public domain according to the copyright laws of different countries, whether that's 50, 60, or 70 years after the rights holders have died.
Some interesting things are entering the public domain this year. The works of T.S. Eliot — so we might expect some Waste Land fan fiction, stories set in that world, or who knows, maybe romance based on the Four Quartets. We also have two of the nonfiction works of Winston Churchill: The Second World War and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. The one that really caught my eye, though, is the first of the Miss Marple stories, Murder at the Vicarage. And there are various other thrillers entering the public domain this year, including works by Leslie Charteris — author of The Saint — the famous writing duo Ellery Queen, and Margery Allingham. So it's an interesting year for classic thrillers.
There are some important things to bear in mind when working with public domain material. In some cases — and this applies to Murder at the Vicarage — it is a single work, not an entire series, that has entered the public domain. This means that the characters entering the public domain are those who feature in that one book, and not necessarily the whole series. We saw this recently with Winnie the Pooh, which entered the public domain in 2022, producing a raft of interesting takes including several not entirely child-friendly ones. It wasn't until two years later that The House at Pooh Corner also entered the public domain, which is when characters like Tigger became available. So be careful if you're planning to use material from the public domain — but do have some fun and explore what's now available.
The CopyMight Coalition
Following on from the theme of copyright, we have the launch of a new organization called the CopyMight Coalition — and I think that's ‘might' as in strength, not as in possibility. There's no implied hesitance there; it's an implied strength that comes from authors acting together. The CopyMight Coalition sets out to pursue a couple of goals. First, AI litigation — in particular lawsuits for copyright infringement and takedown requests where infringement is believed to have occurred. Second, it's looking to help with licensing agreements, allowing rights holders to collectively bargain and get better terms with tech companies. It is very much aimed at indie authors and at making sure that voices are heard that would not otherwise be, because working together is better than working alone when it comes to wielding one's might in negotiations.
This is not to be confused with other organizations of a similar name, such as the Copyright Alliance. Do check out the CopyMight Coalition if it might be of interest to you.
Authors Pursue Full Statutory Damages Against Anthropic
And finally, also on the subject of copyright, there is an interesting new twist in the Anthropic case as we turn 2026. The settlement that has largely been agreed, to which authors are attaching themselves as part of the class action, has reached a figure of $3,000 per title. Some authors are deciding that $3,000 per title is a paltry sum. The statutory limit under the Copyright Act is of course $150,000 — making $3,000 just 2% of the maximum.
When the settlement amount was originally being discussed, one of the arguments that emerged was that if the approximately half a million titles in the class were each eligible for an amount closer to the statutory limit, you could end up with a company like Anthropic going bust. There was a significant debate about whether some companies are too big to fail, and whether courts should factor in the risk of bankruptcy. It seems that this was a pertinent consideration, and so the amount was set much lower — a total settlement of $1.5 billion, which Anthropic was deemed able to pay.
Nonetheless, a group of six authors is now pursuing a collective action — not a class action, but a collective one — against six different firms including Anthropic, seeking the full $150,000 limit per title from each firm, for a total of $900,000 per title spread across the six defendants. The most high-profile author in this group is John Carreyrou, who wrote the exposé of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. It's interesting that someone who has made a living exposing the underhand workings of the tech world should be prominent here.
The rationale behind this action caught my eye because it uses the argument that the quality of generative AI is dependent on the quality of its training data, and that good books are the gold standard for good training data and good outputs. This implies that different books have different value, and that the value of a settlement should depend upon the value of a book toward training AI.
On a practical level, that raises the question of how you would actually settle that. How would a judge who may not be an expert on books determine the relative value of different titles toward AI training? It also feels uncomfortably like a move toward the early days when self-published works were said to be somehow lesser. I'm not saying the authors in this case are arguing that, but it feels like a first step toward a potential argument along those lines — and that potentially divides the authorial community at a time when we should be coming together. Which loops back to the CopyMight Coalition and the importance of working together.
Which seems like a wonderful note of togetherness on which to leave us as we head into 2026. Again, a very, very happy New Year, and I look forward to speaking to you again at the same time next week.
