News Summary: Anthropic Settlement Clears Fairness Hearing; Payout Expected for 93% of Eligible Titles

The Anthropic settlement has just jumped through one of the final hoops before people can expect the courts to order payment. May 14 saw the so-called "fairness" hearing. Now I will preface this as always by saying I am not an expert in the law, and certainly not US as opposed to UK law. On the other hand I've read a lot of coverage of legal cases over the years of reporting for this column (and even in my spare time).

News Summary: Judge Gives Preliminary Approval to Anthropic Settlement Covering 482,000 Books

As promised, here is an update on yesterday’s hearing in the Anthropic case. This is very much breaking and emerging news.

News Summary: Judge Rejects $3000 Per Title Settlement Figure in Anthropic Case

As a newbie indie writer in the UK, I remember many forum discussions on what seemed a dry topic back in the innocent days of the late 2000s as we tried to grapple with the logistics of what was still a fairly niche path to pursue. That topic was “Given that we are protected by UK copyright law, why would we need to follow the complicated and expensive (many of us were penniless) process of registering copyright with the US Copyright Office?” This broke down into two practical subquestions: “Is it really practical to imagine that we will sue someone for infringing our copyright?” and “What would it actually gain us?”