In Letter to the Court, Textbook Authors Complain of Unfair Process, Splits in Anthropic Settlement

The landmark $1.5 billion Antrhopic settlement has been approved, but wrangling over the payouts continue.

This week, Kim Pawlak, Executive Director of the Textbook and Academic Authors Association (TAA), a nonprofit organization representing some 4,000 textbook and academic authors, filed a letter with the court sharing members’ complaints about a confusing claims process, and unfair settlement splits being claimed by publishers.

“The majority of claimants contacting TAA have been textbook (educational) authors, whose works do not benefit from the 50-50 default split afforded by the settlement to trade and academic works,” Pawlak writes. “Some have been outraged to learn of the percentage allocations being claimed by their publishers, which in many cases range from 85% to 95% of the settlement proceeds for the work,” even in cases where it appears the authors may be entitled to “100% of the proceeds,” such as in the case of out-of-print works in which have reverted.

TAA reports that many authors with disputed claims have been informed they must “meet and confer” with their publisher to resolve the disputes, but the vague process has proven to be a “daunting prospect,” with several authors lacking contact information for their publisher, or copies of older contracts.

“More centrally, authors have no idea how to develop arguments to advocate for a split, even if they do have copies of their contracts,” Pawlak told the court. “They are not lawyers, and these contracts are often 20+ pages long, were written by the publishers in the first place, and make no mention of AI training or class settlements or anything else clearly on point.”

Furthermore, unlike publishers with legal departments, “the vast majority of authors” do not have the funds to hire an attorney, Pawlak adds, “the amount at stake for each claim would not make financial sense,” in legal fees would likely “cost more than the author is likely to get even if they prevail on their claim.”

Pawlak also reports that the settlement claims portal has been “riddled with technical problems,” and while the Settlement Administrator has been “helpful at times,” the administrator “does not seem concerned with acknowledging, much less trying to fix or improve, the portal’s “functionality problems.”

Meanwhile, “publishers are far fewer in number, and each has a far greater aggregate interest to justify coordinated counsel to execute an informed and consistent strategy in this zero-sum allocation game,” Pawlak writes. “It is not fair, and it is getting more unfair by piling up procedure after procedure—on the fly—and with increased hurdles for authors to surmount.”

Pawlak concluded by volunteering to testify on the issues impacting the authors, and asked the court to “consider and acknowledge the inherent burden on authors, who are large in number but whose individual claims are small, and who lack coordinated legal representation, against publishers who are small in number but whose individual claims are large, and who have the resources and financial incentive to engage legal representation in this process.”

“Class Counsel (and Anthropic’s counsel) are, understandably, carrying a heavy burden in attempting to get this settlement across the finish line,” Pawlak wrote. “But it should not come at the cost of fairness to educational authors—roughly 25% of the class—who have been at a disadvantage from the beginning of this process.”

‘A Moment Like this Requires Cooperation’

The TAA letter comes after the group last month joined multiple other authors and writers organizations, including the Authors Guild, in calling on publishers to voluntarily relinquish claims on out of print books, regardless of whether the rights have reverted, and use a portion of their payouts to pay authors who were excluded because their copyrights weren’t registered.

“A moment like this requires cooperation, and authors are looking to publishers to act as partners in sustaining the writing profession,” the organizations wrote in a release. “Publishers, especially the major houses which have thousands of books in the settlement, will be receiving large sums of money which will have a noticeably positive impact on their bottom lines. By contrast, only a handful of authors will be getting more than a modest vacation or the ability to pay bills from the settlement.”