Halfway meaningful

You may be a winner!

We get a constant flow of notices for class action payouts. Most pertain to some product we never used. This one is somewhat relevant.

Anthropic AI reached a settlement with a class group of authors, paying everyone whose book was in LibraryGenesis. I’m coauthor of two books in this group, so I’ll eventually get a payment without doing anything. Judging by the approximations in the notice, multiplying by two books and dividing by coauthors, I might end up with about $2000, a meaningful amount. Apparently they’ll figure the exact amounts after they’ve heard from authors who opt out and authors who want more. This will take at least six months.

One previous class settlement WAS worth the trouble though not huge. My old NYC publisher was sued by some authors who felt their royalty percentage wasn’t up to competitive standards. It seemed like a trivial concern, probably driven more by lawyers than authors. They weren’t suing for ACTUAL violations of contracts. I was glad to get the money as misplaced justice for a previous ACTUAL violation, when the publisher was being LBO’d by JP Morgan and paid only part of the CONTRACTUAL royalties. They eventually completed those payments a year later. The unneeded payment for the trivial suit was about what I deserved as interest on the non-trivial delay, so it balanced the equation.