Hey ho, welcome to the Publishing Nerd Corner, where we dive into the more technical aspects of authorship.

Jess here. I love it when Sarina schools me on all things publishing nerdery, so we decided to make it official and create a whole new series. I have a long list of things I want her to explain for us, so stay tuned for more.

In the meantime, our first Nerd Corner chat is a timely episode about the Anthropic case specifically and registering your copyright specifically.

We’re going to discuss:

* The benefits of registering your copyright with the United States Copyright Office.

* The possibility of a settlement in the Anthropic lawsuit, and what that could mean for authors.

* Why copyright registration will be part of any potential settlement.

* How to register your copyright.

* Did your publisher fulfill its obligation to register your copyright?

For more information about the benefits of copyright registration, see the Copyright Alliance

To register your copyright yourself, you’ll need Copyright.gov.

You will also want to read the Authors Guild post about, “What Authors Need to Know About the Anthropic Settlement”

Hit that “play” button and nerd out with us for fifteen minutes!

Transcript below!

EPISODE 466 - TRANSCRIPT

Jess Lahey

Hey, it's Jess Lahey. If you've been listening to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast for any length of time, you know that, yes, I am a writer, but my true love, my deepest love, is combining writing with speaking. I get to go into schools, into community organizations, into nonprofits, into businesses, and do everything from lunch-and-learns, to community reads, to just teaching about the topics that I'm an expert in. From the topics in The Gift of Failure, engagement, learning, learning in the brain, cognitive development, getting kids motivated, and yes, the topic of over parenting and what that does to kids learning, to topics around The Addiction Inoculation, substance use prevention in kids, and what I've been doing lately that's the most fun for me, frankly, is combining the two topics. It makes the topic of substance use prevention more approachable, less scary when we're talking about it in the context of learning and motivation and self-efficacy and competence and, yes, cognitive development. So if you have any interest in bringing me into your school, to your nonprofit, to your business, I would love to come. You can go to Jessicalahey.com. Look under the menu option “Speaking” and go down to “Speaking Inquiry.” There's also a lot of information on my website about what I do. There's videos there about how I do it. Please feel free to get in touch. And I hope I get to come to your community. If you put in the speaking inquiry that you are a Hashtag AmWriting listener, we can talk about a discount. So that can be one of the bonuses for being a loyal and long-term listener to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. Hope to hear from you.

Multiple Speakers

Is it recording? Now it's recording. Yay! Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. Try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. All right, let's start over. Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay. Now, one, two, three.

Jess Lahey

Hey, welcome to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. I'm Jess Lahey, your host, along with another host today—this is going to be super fun. We are the podcast about writing: short things, long things, poetry, prose, book proposals, querying agents—we're basically the podcast about getting the work done. I am Jess Lahey. I'm the author of The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation. And you can find my journalism at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.

Sarina Bowen

And I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of many contemporary novels, and also a council member on The Authors Guild. And it is in that spirit that we are bringing you a special episode today, which we're calling part of our Publishing Nerd Corner segment.

Jess Lahey

Our favorite stuff.

Sarina Bowen

Yeah, so publishing nerd stuff. Here we go, and the topic is pretty timely.

Jess Lahey

And juicy.

Sarina Bowen

And juicy. We're talking about why authors copyright their work, what it means, and how it ties into everything going on with the Anthropic lawsuit and potential settlement.

Jess Lahey

So, backing up, could you tell us a little bit about the Anthropic lawsuit, and sort of what it was about, and why everybody's talking about it right now?

Sarina Bowen

Of course. So, Anthropic is an AI LLM, Large Language Model Company, just like OpenAI is the same as ChatGPT. Anthropic are the people who make Claude, but all the AI big companies are being sued right now, including Meta, including Microsoft, or...

Jess Lahey

Google. Google.

Sarina Bowen

Yeah, sorry.

Jess Lahey

Not Microsoft.

Sarina Bowen

And also the new one is there's a new lawsuit against Apple. So, basically, everybody who went out and made a big LLM model using stolen, pirated books and articles downloaded from the Internet is being sued variously by different organizations, and it looks like the Anthropic lawsuit might be resolved first.

Jess Lahey

Okay, so what are they being sued for?

Sarina Bowen

They're being sued for a couple of things. First is the wholesale piracy of lots of books downloaded off the internet, and second, for feeding all of those books into their models to teach them how to speak and compose.

Jess Lahey

A while ago, weren't some—I think some—internal memos around the whole Meta thing where, essentially, they acknowledged how much it would cost to purchase legally all of the things they needed to model, do their large LLMs, and they decided, “Wow, that would be a lot of money.”

Sarina Bowen

Right.

Jess Lahey

“We'll just steal them.”

Sarina Bowen

We don't want to deal with copyright. Well, specifically, the most interesting internal memos that we've seen have been involved in the Meta case, which we're not really talking about tonight, but yeah, there are some big smoking guns out there. But I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the practical nature of copyrighting your work, because there's a potential settlement on the table that's taking shape in terms of how authors will be paid some portion of a $1.5 billion settlement from this Anthropic suit, potentially, and whether or not you have a registered copyright on your book is going to matter. So, first of all, in this case, the judge did rule—well, we wanted him to rule—that using these books to train the model was not a fair use situation.

Jess Lahey

Right. They were trying to say, “No, no, this is just fair use.”

Sarina Bowen

Right.

Jess Lahey

“We shouldn't have to pay anybody.”

Sarina Bowen

And unfortunately, we don't have a ruling in favor of this concept yet, and The Authors Guild cares very much that it's not fair use and will continue to fight for that. But we instead were ruled in this case something that is actually quite powerful and important to the whole conversation, which is that the judge said that Anthropic downloading all of these titles—these millions of stolen books—from a piracy site was, in fact, illegal and that they are going to have to pay. So the ruling was against them. So now this