This week, the lawyers and claims administrator behind the Anthropic class action for authors finally started communicating with folks. They have started sending emails to people with links where the people can see lists of their books, if the allocation for the books is uncontested, and a way to adjust the allocation if it is contested.
And all hell is breaking loose.
For one, it seems there are some very greedy publishers out there. They’re either trying to take 100% of the claim, or they’re making claims on works that have reverted entirely to the authors.
Courtney Milan has been outlining in Bluesky what she’s done in her specific instance of this happening, but it’s something she should not have to do. Why? Because the administrator of the claims should be providing something more than a few paragraphs thrown together in what seems to be a beer and pizza midnight session.
Instead of providing instructions that explain what to do in specific instances, such as uploading reversion letters if the rights have reverted, we have online instructions that seem to reflect an attitude that every written word costs the claims administrator actual money, so brevity hasn’t been applied, it’s been tortured.
So then we’re faced with a primitive online system where you can update allocations, and supposedly put in what you think the allocations should be and then initiate a dialog with other authors and publishers. Except…
When you put in updates and access the form at a later time, seemingly none of the updates you put in are reflected. And the supposed checkbox which you would check to allow others to see your contact information, isn’t there.
In my case, I and my publisher agree on several books, but several show me claiming 100% on several books because of an early error in the claims process (see earlier mention, primitive systems). OK, no problem, I’ve got this.
I just go in, update the allocation to show that my split should be the default (50% to me, 50% to the publisher), submit it, everything seems fine…but nothing seems to take.
If I access the books list again, it still shows these books in contention, it doesn’t show my changes, and I have no idea what I need to do next, or what’s happening in the system, because the claims administrator decided we really didn’t need documentation about how this whole resolution process is supposed to work.
As an example, when I submitted my adjusted allocation, even though it corrects the supposed contention, does it still have to go to the publisher to get an official okee dokee? What do they see that would make this so, because the forms I’m seeing don’t have an official ‘okee dokee’ checkbox next to the titles.
I have several emails into the administrator with questions, and will update here if I get anything back. I’ll also call at 8:30 when the claims administrator office opens…when I can figure out the time zone since the message system doesn’t give this (assuming PDT).
Perhaps the claims administrator should have used Claude to create everything. Then again, perhaps the claims administrator did use Claude to create everything.