John Carlos BaezHey, Anthropic owes me $9000! They illegally used at least 3 of my books on LibGen to create Claude. Now they're paying a $1.5 billion settlement, at $3000 per book. See if *your* books are on the list:
https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/
If so, you have until March 23, 2026 to file a claim. The above website lets you file a claim, but this one explains everything more clearly:
Actually I exaggerated: the payment will be split between authors and publishers, but I have to make the claim - so the settlement is making me do some work my publisher should be doing for me. My coauthors and I will just get half, $4500. One of these books has 2 coauthors, one has 3, and one is a book I edited, with essays by lots of authors. So $1000 is a more realistic estimate of what I get. Oh well.
Bizarrely, my most popular book, Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity, is not on the list. But I guess it's not surprising:
"The settlement agreement discloses that approximately 500,000 titles out of the 7 million copies of books that Anthropic reportedly downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi meet the definition required to be part of the class."
Only books whose copyright is registered with the US Library of Congress meet that defiinition!
If you have a book on the list, you can opt out of the current settlement and join future lawsuits. But you have to take action to do that!!! For more information on that, see item 40 here:
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