The recent Anthropic AI settlement has me thinking a lot about copyright. I’m in the US, and we can register our works with the US copyright office. It’s not hugely expensive – about $45 if you do it before publication and $65 if you do it after the fact.
But US copyright law also says that if you indicate that a work is copyrighted – by including a copyright page – then you are covered by copyright protections without having to formally register. So it’s not always been necessary to do the paid registration to enjoy copyright protection in the United States.
For an indie author like me, it was pretty much a no-brainer. Why pay the extra money when you already have such small margins? Some books won’t even earn out $45 in a lifetime, and you’re already paying for editing, a cover, formatting, and a myriad of other costs.
Before this year, I had only ever formally registered one of my first books, Skythane, and after that had not registered any others.
But then the plaintiffs in the Anthropic case made a settlement agreement with the company, and one of the terms of that settlement was that only people whose works were officially registered with the US Copyright Office would get compensated.
In some ways, it’s a landmark decision, finally forcing one of these Generative AI companies to compensate authors for the work that was taken from them without permission. This case is somewhat unique in that the works that were stolen were out of a pirated data set. The judge ruled that Anthropic was within their “fair use” rights to scrape our books without our permission – bad – but that the company had erred in doing so from a pirated book set. I’m guessing that it was that fact that caused Anthropic to settle, before the decision could be appealed and the “fair use” part be re-litigated.
And it’s basically a slap on the wrist – the company settled for $1.5 billion, which is less than 1% of its current $183 billion valuation
But by making author compensation contingent on whether the author had actually paid for a copyright registration, we are leaving out an entire swath of indie and small press authors who were victimized along with everyone else, but will not receive a penny of the settlement money if they did not go to the extra expense of formally registering their copyrights.
And the people that are getting paid are presumably the ones who were with bigger publishers who paid the copyright fees for them, or big name authors who could afford to pay for copyright registration for all their works. For an author with 10 copyrighted works, this would be a $30,000 windfall.
So while I am glad that one of these companies is finally being held to account, I am disappointed in how it went down in the particulars, because they matter. A lot.
But even if you do decide to dive in and pay the fee, it’s not always smooth sailing. I’m about to enter into a contract for derivative rights on one of my works, and someone suggested that I sign up for copyright protection because the contract indicates that any copyright claims will fall on me. So I bit the bullet and, especially in light of this recent Anthropic settlement, decided to go ahead and copyright the book. I’m fortunate that it is already earned enough money to more than pay for the copyright cost.
There are also some hidden pitfalls in the process, especially if you have never (or rarely) done it before. The main one that I ran into was the offer to expedite the process. I thought “That sounds nice. I’m doing this because of a pending contract – and look, there’s even an option for that! There was no mention of an added cost.
What I didn’t catch until I checked out with my credit card was that this adds both an $800 expedition fee and a $550 recording fee, bringing the fairly modest $65 charge up to a total of $1415! Because I don’t have the benefit of having lawyers or a big publishing firm to do these kinds of things for me, I end up being the one who gets hurt.
I wish these processes were more friendly for authors like me. And I wish that our representatives in court were less willing to sell out indie authors to get paychecks for trad published ones.
But we live in the world that we do, so each of us has to make our own decisions in this respect.
In this new environment, I’d argue that it probably does make sense to start formally registering your books, at least your novels.
Just be careful when you do. It’s a jungle out there.