Thanks to long-term indie friend Guy Gonzalez for sharing details of a new way of communicating how you want AI companies to treat the material to which you hold the rights. Really Sensible Licensing (RSL) allows you to choose the way you want firms to handle your creative content, and the conditions you set for them to do so.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
In this, it works a lot like Creative Commons, where you make a number of choices about who uses your work and how. Like Creative Commons, attribution and monetisation are at the heart of the terms. You can specify whether AI firms can only use your content if they credit it through links. And you can state that in order to use it they need to contact you to negotiate financial terms (you can embed contact procedures in the license).
New Tools for Writers’ Rights
This is one of a number of ways of embedding instructions about the use of your material where that material exists. Created by Humans is another, which partnered with the Authors Guild. And I believe Bookwire automatically includes do-not-scrape instructions in all their digital files. Whether any of these tools is effective in protecting our work and ensuring we get the credit and compensation we want is, of course, yet to be seen (and might depend on the outcome of the final item in this column).
Guy’s original link was to an article posted by Medium, which has used RSL to create a license for the work on its platform that insists on giving credit in the form of incoming links where material is used. Medium is also undertaking a consultation to see exactly what its authors think it should be doing, so if you use Medium be sure to take a look.
Save the Date: Anthropic Case Update
And finally, a big “save the date” notice. This week’s news may not be as regular as usual. That’s because on September 25, the judge in the class action against Anthropic will rule on whether he is happy with the list of books that has been compiled as comprising the “class.” Authors’ groups have made clear that this list is not limited to those titles whose authors have expressed a belief they should be part of the claim. It should include all titles.
The key thing to note is that if the judge is happy with the list, there will also be a searchable database of titles on it. As soon as there are details of how to find and search the database, I will post them. That should be Saturday, but I will wait until the details are out and then get them straight to you.
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