Last week notices went out to all claimants in the Anthropic case, summarising each of their claims, who else has filed a claim for each title and the percentage of the award others have claimed. 🧵

Important Information Regarding Anthropic Copyright Settlement Claim Notices

As part of the claims reconciliation process in the Anthropic copyright class action lawsuit, the settlement administrator sent out notices this week to all claimants summarizing each of their…

authorsguild.org

The offer of £££ of *e-books* to review an academic manuscript is, I submit, a piss-take by an academic press

I always suspected the title of his later novel “Nice Work” was him getting a bit of his own back at the Gershwin estate for that…

In my novel Bournville I wanted to quote eight words of a Robert Wyatt lyric ('How can I rise if you don't fall?'). Robert (of course) was fine with it but it was his former publishers we had to deal with. Eventually Penguin negotiated them down to £500 but their first quote was £4,450.

Blake Morrison on what it cost him (not his publisher) to include lines from pop lyrics in his 2007 novel South of the River.

I'm thinking the key rights here are those for copyright infringement damages, so we're back to 50%...

James McConnachie@jamesmcconnachie.bsky.social · 6d ago

oh! so if you retained 100% of relevant rights in the contract (eg 'electronic media') you can choose to 'deviate from the default' and claim 100% of the settlement?

Is this the first-ever double-ghosted book? (Given that 'James Patterson' is actually a team of writers.)

AJ Jefferies@moonjam.com · 6d ago

omg he actually did it

I know I already posted about this...but to reiterate: Anthropic copyright settlement authors, PLEASE contact me (Writer Beware) if your publisher is making a claim on a book whose rights have reverted, or claiming anything other than a 50/50 split on an in-contract book. beware@sfwa.org

Courtney Milan@courtneymilan.com · 7d ago

FINALLY: If anyone gets a response from a publisher that is something along the lines of "yeah, we just asserted ownership for all titles that had our name listed as publisher regardless of reversion status" PLEASE send that information to me or @victoriastrauss.com.

Remember: it could be someone you know.

Sadly, I no longer have the book but Julian Barnes’ Letters from London mentions an unnamed author who is ‘unavoidably detained’ & fails to attend a talk he was scheduled to appear at. The index entry for that page: ‘McEwan, Ian, unavoidably goes skiing.’

But nothing beats the obstetrics textbook wherein one of the authors made his wife do the index, so she slips this one in:

One tries not to add to the burden of climate angst but anyone who has been on a glacier knows that the scale of this is... unimaginable.

Nahel Belgherze@wxnb.bsky.social · 2w ago

An incredibly well-timed Landsat 9 pass captured the effects of yesterday’s catastrophic glacier collapse near the Nepal–Tibet border. The event was so massive that it was detected by seismometers around the world.

Making Tax Difficult sorry Digital question: can any freelancers recommend the simplest possible bridging software to get from my basic Excel sheet records to HMRC submission? I'm only interested in the free options. MyTaxDigital? Monzo? Free Agent? Clear Books Free?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, in theory, we could show prior drafts etc. But what a ball ache! All this invisible labor being asked of us when we're the victims of AI scraping in the first place!

Amazon? Doing something that's bad for books? Surely not!

Joseph Cox@josephcox.bsky.social · 3w ago

New from 404 Media: we solved which AI company is buying massive shipments of rare books, scanning and destroying them to train AI. We put an Apple AirTag in a rare book, followed it. It ended up at an Amazon facility. Its logo is a dinosaur ripping through a book www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...

The US District Court for the Northern District of California has granted final approval of the parties’ class settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic. 👇

Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement approved

ebx.sh

I think this would be a great opportunity for someone. And you don’t have to be young.

Midas @midascampaigns.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Are you passionate about books, arts and culture? Are you seeking a career in PR? We'd love to hear from you! Applications are now open for our internship programme. More details are on our website: midaspr.co.uk/vacancies/pr...

People need to grapple with the fact we're in an epistemic crisis that's starting to corrode countless elements of human knowledge.

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 2mo ago

Al-altered images on birdwatching forums putting research at risk

How to begin a career in the arts? First get your grandma to correspond with Rilke. Then get your dad to sell the family tapestries to pay the school fees. (I'd add that one journo described EdW as 'the sweetest, most welcoming person I’ve ever interviewed'. Just not sure how this book will land.)

The Bookseller@thebookseller.com · 2mo ago

Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage, has acquired How to Begin by writer and artist Edmund de Waal. 👇

Is there any research, about how many authors are still being published five years after debut? I suspect the number is dwindling, but wouldn't know where to look. @thebookseller.com @louiestowell.bsky.social Any ideas?

Huge new class action lawsuit filed by big publishers and authors against Google this week over AI training. It accuses Google of taking millions of books / articles provided to them for use only in Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar, and secretly using them to train LLMs. 🧵 1/4

Calling all aspiring writers! There are still a couple of places on two creative writing retreats I'm teaching in the coming months. One is in English in Umbria in Oct. (17th-24th): great co-tutors, Italian food, pool, yoga, table tennis, fine wine and hard work! villapia.com/a-haven-for-...

wait till he hears some of them were swedish

Dexerto@dexerto.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A Norway fan has gone viral for not taking part in their Row celebration after matches and won't do it if they win the World Cup "It’s factually wrong; they didn’t row, they sailed over the Atlantic”

Meta is outrageous. The lack of outrage in relation to SW-W is surely connected to the fact that she worked there for years, she signed an NDA when she left (I know, she says it was under duress) and she has promoted the hell out of the book on the back of the scandal.

The Bookseller@thebookseller.com · 2mo ago

Sarah Wynn-Williams, an author resident in the UK and published by a UK publisher, has been silenced for more than a year by a US court at the behest of a tech mega-corp, yet where is the outrage?, asks Philip Jones 👇

This is also how I feel about the prospect of reading an entire book written by AI. What’s the fucking point? Why should I pay the value of my attention to someone who has not paid the value of theirs?

James McConnachie@jamesmcconnachie.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I'm sure the pitch I was just sent was AI-generated. Vague yet faintly grandiose. Professional yet slightly chummy. Writers, if you're ever considering pitching to an editor using AI: don't. I can tell you that I was INFURIATED by it. A waste of my time and an insult to my professionalism.

So… as a medievalist it was a combination

Dexerto@dexerto.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A Norway fan has gone viral for not taking part in their Row celebration after matches and won't do it if they win the World Cup "It’s factually wrong; they didn’t row, they sailed over the Atlantic”

I'm sure the pitch I was just sent was AI-generated. Vague yet faintly grandiose. Professional yet slightly chummy. Writers, if you're ever considering pitching to an editor using AI: don't. I can tell you that I was INFURIATED by it. A waste of my time and an insult to my professionalism.

wow! I just discovered that the arrow was probably shoved in the eye of (possibly) Harold in the 1842 restoration.

Authors: up your game

frank: print witch@mxfrankduffy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

apropos of me clearing out old photos on my phone, here is my favourite ever author photograph (Raymond Chandler)

I enjoyed this piece very much. "What was quintessentially English has melted away into something that speaks to another England, a not-yet England, precarious and ill-defined."

Amanda Mason@amandajanemason.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Come for the Tirzah Garwood trivia, stay for this astonishing thing.