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ON WRITING
How I “Met” Sheryl Crow by Filling Out My Anthropic Settlement Claim
If you’re a published writer, here’s how to fill your claim and maybe (sort of) meet someone famous, too
I’ve published a few books over the years, so I was curious if any of them made the Anthropic download list.
In case the first sentence has no meaning for you, here’s some background
Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude AI, got hit with a class action lawsuit claiming that it infringed authors’ copyrights when it downloaded millions of entire copyrighted books in violation of U.S. copyright law. Anthropic responded to the lawsuit by claiming that its use of the downloaded “datasets” constituted fair use because it only wanted to train its models on the content for its LLM models.
The litigants, however, also accused the firm of piracy, partly because the sources of their downloads contained pirated works.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of authors Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief), and Andrea Bartz (We Were Never Here) by three legal firms: Susman Godfrey LLP, Ieff Cabraser Heimmann & Bernstein LLP, and Cowan Debaets…

