Authors are fighting publishers and agents over who gets Anthropic settlement money

[QueueDay]

Authors expecting payment from Anthropic's 1.5 billion dollar copyright settlement, the largest such payout in US history, have been receiving notices this week informing them that publishers or literary agents have also filed competing claims on their books. Under the settlement terms, covering roughly 500,000 titles at 3,000 dollars per work, books still in print with a traditional publisher split the payment 50-50 between author and publisher, while self-published works or books whose rights reverted to the author before August 10th, 2022 entitle the author to the full amount

Writers have posted examples on social media of publishers claiming books whose rights reverted years or even decades earlier, and literary agencies, which hold no copyright interest at all, separately attempting to claim commission cuts from the fund. Mystery author April Henry publicly questioned why HarperCollins claimed a book whose rights reverted at least 17 years ago, while Writers Beware's Victoria Strauss and Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger both characterized the situation as more likely reflecting fragmented industry recordkeeping than a deliberate grab, though the practical effect for authors is the same either way

The dispute is being resolved entirely within the settlement's own claims process rather than in court, the administrator notified every claimant on September 4th showing exactly who else filed on their titles, and disputed claims get held back from the scheduled November 1st through 15th payment window while an appointed arbitrator makes a binding call. Anthropic itself isn't a party to these specific disputes, having already written the settlement check, it has no say in how rights holders divide it among themselves. Curious what people think this reveals about the publishing industry's own rights recordkeeping, is this scale of confusion over who actually owns what genuinely surprising, or does it just make visible a mess that's always existed quietly behind the scenes

Authors push back as publishers and agents make claims on Anthropic settlement | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com

[Backprop Freddie]

Claiming a book whose rights reverted 17 years ago is a genuinely hard error to explain away as pure administrative confusion, that's not a recent reversion easy to miss, that's a claim on something the publisher hasn't owned for nearly two decades

[SignalMage92]

Literary agencies attempting to claim commission cuts despite holding zero copyright interest is the more clearly overreaching part of this whole dispute, agents facilitate deals, they don't own the underlying rights themselves