Bruce Lawson ✅ ♫ ♿ ✌️♂️✊Anthropic stole the books I co-wrote in order to train their planet-burning hallucination machine, so I've filed a claim. They wept that if every plagiarised author does so, the company will go bankrupt. Boo emdash hoo. www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com
Mx. Luna Corbden 🐸@brucelawson @Pinchy63 Sadly I do not qualify in this suit because they managed to convince the court that copyright had to be registered, in spite of other ample evidence of my ownership. 😔 But I'm very happy that many other authors will be paid and that is a steep enough penalty to actual hurt them.
Garrett Wollman@corbden @brucelawson @[email protected] That's what the parties agreed to. If you're excluded from the settlement, you can still sue them yourself (they're counting on you not doing that because it would be too expensive for you). The lack of prior registration means you're only entitled to actual damages (the lost income) and not the much larger statutory damages — unless you can persuade a court in a different country of a different theory of infringement under that country's laws.
@corbden @brucelawson @[email protected] The district court already ruled that *using* the stolen books to train the model is fair use; the settlement covers the infringement involved in making copies of the works during the setup. Another country's courts could hold that the model itself was an infringing derivative work, and if an author could prove that the model was imported into or copied within that country, they would have a legally independent basis for suit.
@wollman @brucelawson @Pinchy63 I can still be sad about it. Because I don't have the means to do all that.
But US copyright law states that a work is copyrighted to the author the moment it's written. Registration serves to prove ownership if there's a dispute, but other methods of proof are valid *generally*. Just not in this case. And that was a choice.
And I'm allowed to be sad about that, that when I wrote and published these works I was in over my head dealing with being a new struggling writer while also dealing with an abuser, that I didn't have it in me to manage registering them as well. The fact that I published them, and have ISBNs and print copies from 2012-2014 should be more than enough. I guess only big wigs with plenty of means should be allowed to have their rights enforced. 🤷🏻♂️
@corbden Yes, it was a choice on the part of Congress to make statutory damages and attorney's fees available only for infringements subsequent to registration. It seems like Congress was really thumbing its nose at all the prior Berne signatories, "Yes, you'll be legally entitled to relief absent formalities, it will just bankrupt you before you recover a pittance."