STEALTH AI — What’s An Author To Do?
Watch Your Back, Author! AI is after you…
AI is after your book. That is the message from the newest lawsuit addressing how AI sucks creatives dry. In Bartz v. Anthropic authors are warned to protect their copyright.
In a previous world, a world before COVID and AI — perhaps in a different reality — protecting your copyright meant mailing a copy of your book to yourself. Later, one could feel their work was properly copyrighted by publishing under a registered ISBN and having copyright language on the copyright page. Afterall, US law states a work is copyrighted as soon as the author publishes that work.
It is true that an author does not need to register with the U.S. Copyright Office or pay a fee for their work to be copyrighted. That is, unless they want to be able to sue for infringement.
Many “infringers” in the past were pirating books from countries other than the US, making inforcement of US copyright law challenging to impossible. This is one reason I didn’t bother to copyright my first books. My opinion was they were protected already by US law and there would be no way to fight foreign pirating.
AI changed everything!
There is very limited legal inforcement of your copyright if you have not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office’s electronic registration system.Unregistered works are limited to actual damages + infringer’s profits, which are much harder to prove and usually far smaller. So, although most works are automatically copyrighted, federal courts uphold rights of registered works.
In Bartz v. Anthropic, authors came out on top for a change. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion with a ‘B’ for using pirated books in their training, without admitting copyright infringement. Eligible authors — those authors who had registered their work — may claim up to almost $3,000 per title (the deadline is fast approaching to make a claim!)
The Court really frowned on Anthropic using pirated materials for “training purposes” — as they lamely defended. If the works had been lawfully acquired, however, no sweat the court essentially said. But they were stolen.
Since the AI model depends upon stealing, this is good news for authors. It comes with a warning, however. Get your work registered!
Another warning for authors: don’t give your work away unknowingly. For example, giving ‘exclusive’ rights versus ‘limited’ rights on your work. Or not defining the time frame for rights extended. Another way to give away your rights is to release your work under ‘creative commons’ or ‘public domain.’
Stop and take a closer look. Dig deeper (but avoid AI research as it is often wrong!) A good place for reviewing contracts with publishers and other copyright issues is the Authors Guild.
Beware. And forgive me for repeating: Get your work registered!
Just Keep Scratchin’!
