Authors: Join Me in Suing Meta, Anthropic & OpenAI

I've opened a new front in the war against AI companies stealing our work to train the language models that are designed to put us out of business.

A few weeks ago I laid out my case for authors to sue tech companies for illegally appropriating the work of published authors. Our creative labor laid the foundations for them to build trillion-dollar artificial intelligence platforms that are designed to make human writing obsolete. Now I’m happy to announce that I’ve teamed up with the intellectual property lawyer James Bartolomei III with a plan to gather up as many writers as possible and take the case to court. If you are an author with registered copyrights on your work (pretty much any book published through a mainstream publisher) you are invited to join in on the action.

Considering that each copyright violation carries penalties up to $150,000, by my estimation each AI Company owes me between $900,000 - $3.3 Million.

There are currently about a dozen similar cases against Meta, OpenAI, Google and Anthropoic making their way through the court system. In the next few months the courts will attempt to lump all the legal complaints together into giant class action where the most likely outcome is that writers will probably recover around $5,000 for each violation of their intellectual property. While some people might be willing to take such a paltry amount, every author also has the right to opt-out of the class of writers in that judgement and bring a separate case against Meta in order to seek full damages. That’s what we plan to do.

While there is no guarantee that we will win, the larger a group of writers we can gather together to opt out of the upcoming judgements means more power at the negotiating table.

Here’s what you need to do to join the case:

1. Check Anna’s Archive to see if one of your books has been listed in an online database that was downloaded by AI companies to train their large language models.

2. Check to see if any of books that appeared in that database were properly registered in the Copyright Registration Database.

3. If you have any books that appeared in both databases send an email to James Bartolomei (james@duncanfirm.com) with that information and tell him you want to be part of the lawsuit.

4. Tell your fellow authors to join up as well.

Please spread this message far and wide. At the very least authors now have a chance to be thorns in the side of AI companies.