The following is a letter I sent to the Irish Times this morning. I have added it here in case it isn’t published.

Anthropic Settlement

Dear Sir,

I was reading the online version of the Irish Times on Sunday, July 26th.

In an article about the Anthropic settlement, Conor Kostick, the Irish Writers Union Disputes Officer, was quoted as saying hundreds of Irish Writers will be compensated by the Anthropic settlement around the use of the pirated books DB LibGen that Anthropic used to train their Large Language Models. 

I have serious doubts about the number. 

Some Irish Writers will be compensated, that is, those whose works are registered in the US copyright database. Or, couched in slightly different terms, traditionally published authors. Most Irish writers, like myself, won’t be compensated because we are Indie published, and don’t register our works in that database – we are told by the relevant legislative bodies that it isn’t necessary. As soon as we mark our work with the copyright statement, it is protected. We are also legally obliged to buy ISBNs to assign to our books, and register them in the ISBN database, which should be further protection. This is apparently not the case. It would seem that traditionally published authors are due a level of protection that Indie published authors are not. 

The estimated compensation is 3000 dollars per book. I have three books that were stolen and that’s 9000 dollars I could do with, especially in today’s market where AI generated publications are flooding the market.

Yours,

Philip Hughes