Indie Authors Unite

DECEMBER 22nd UPDATE!

Fellow Indie Author Christopher Greyson here. I wanted you to know that a big law firm out of Arkansas is planning to file a lawsuit against Anthropic, the tech company that stole our books. The plaintiffs will be authors who opt out of the settlement and sue for the copyright violation involved in their theft of the authors’ works to train their LLM. The law firm would handle the cases on a contingency basis. They would cover the costs of the suit and get paid a percentage of any settlement or award.  

Informational video conference calls are being scheduled for Tues. Dec. 23 and  Sat. Dec. 27 - and depending on interest, possibly a third on Mon. Dec. 29.  Authors who are considering opting out of the Anthropic settlement can join the call to get more information about this lawsuit and have their questions answered about available options in connection with the Anthropic matter, deadlines for decision-making, consequences of action or inaction, etc. 

If you would like to participate in one of these Zoom calls, please contact my lawyer, Deborah Hrbek, to let her know at https://www.hrbeklaw.com/contact.html. Deborah will provide you with the dates/times/login details for the informational meetings as soon as these have been confirmed.

I highly recommend you at least consider learning more about the lawsuit as the payout, if we win, would far exceed the miserly amount being offered. Plus it’s a matter of principle - we don’t give up any of our copyrights.

Christopher Greyson
New York Times International Bestselling Author
GreysonMedia.com

*****

My name is Christopher Greyson, and I am a storyteller. Since I was a little boy, I have dreamt of what mystery was around the next corner, or what quest lay over the hill. If I couldn’t find an adventure, one usually found me, and now I weave those tales into my stories. I am blessed to have written over twenty novels, and I am a New York Times bestselling author.

I am writing to you today about an issue that affects all of us, no matter where we are in our writing careers. Anthropic – a large technology firm in California – has stolen millions of books. Our books. Anthropic has admitted in court (Bartz v. Anthropic) that they downloaded our books from illegal websites onto their company computers in order to train its Artificial Intelligence (AI) bot, commonly known as “Claude”.  Even if you’re not on the “official” list of writers who have had their work stolen, your books may still have been ripped off. But the theft doesn’t stop there. Claude allows anyone to leverage our work to create similar books that they can then claim as their own, in order to sell and compete with us on Amazon and every other book selling site.

As part of the settlement reached in Bartz v. Anthropic, Anthropic has agreed to pay copyright holders and remove the unlawfully obtained and pirated book files from their computer storage. The total settlement amount in Bartz v. Anthropic has been set at $1.5 billion dollars, but the problem is that these funds will primarily be awarded to the lawyers and publishing houses, leaving us authors with less than $3,000 per book.

They want to destroy our livelihood and use us to pull off the largest creative heist in history. Additionally, the Bartz case will not establish the fact that using author novels in this manner is not an appropriate exercise of “fair use”, which means that not only have they stolen our work, they are going to continue use our words, our creativity, and our inspiration, and their computer program (Claude) will regurgitate it and claim it as its own. And we will get paid—nothing.

That’s wrong, it’s outrageous, and should be stopped.

Other Indie authors and I are filing a suit to prevent this. Would you like to join us? If you do, please help by forwarding this message to any/all authors you know!

 Sincerely,

Fellow Indie Author

Christopher Greyson
New York Times International Bestselling Author
GreysonMedia.com