The official blog of Writer Beware® shines a bright light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls. Also providing advice for writers, industry news, and commentary. Writer Beware® is sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.
You open your email program one morning. The usual work stuff. Some spam (annoying that it got past your filters!). A couple of newsletters (maybe later). You sip your coffee, scroll down.
Wait. What's this? An email from...Suzanne Collins? The Suzanne Collins?
This can't be real, you think. Why would Suzanne Collins be contacting you out of the blue? And why is she introducing herself as if she were an unknown writer querying for her unpublished manuscript?
The enormous, $1.5 billion Anthropic copyright class action settlement is reputedly the biggest copyright infringement recovery in history. With such a high-profile case, it's inevitable that eligible authors aren't the only ones looking to benefit.
Yesterday, the Publishers Lunch newsletter published a story about an Arizona law firm called ClaimsHero that has mounted a push, complete with social media ads, to encourage authors to opt out of the Anthropic settlement. Why? Presumably, because authors who opt out preserve their right to sue Anthropic, and ClaimsHero wants to identify clients for a possible class action lawsuit of its own that could enable it to reap a big payout on contingency.
ClaimsHero, which appears to be the kind of law firm that advertises on billboards along the highway, has created a webpage for this effort that frames opting out in terms of money (of course). If your work is included in the settlement, why settle for a measly $3,000 when you could receive up to $150,000, the maximum amount of statutory damages available for willful copyright infringement? (Emphasis added):
One of the most urgent issues confronting writers and other creators right now is the use of copyrighted material for generative AI training.
The large language models that power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude require “training” via the ingestion of vast amounts of text, images, and other materials scraped from the internet or incorporated into databases created by AI companies.
Much of this material is protected by copyright. For the most part, AI companies have not sought permission from rights holders for exploiting their work in this way (nor did creators even start discovering the extent of the companies’ use of their content until a few years ago). They claim permission isn’t needed because AI training falls under the definition of fair use—a limited and transformative use of the material that does not require the copyright owner’s agreement (or remuneration).
I've published a couple of posts now about the tidal wave of AI-driven book marketing scams from Nigeria that has swept over the writing world in the past year or so.
A hallmark of these scams has been how abruptly they appeared and how fast they have become ubiquitous. But proliferation isn't the only way in which Nigerian scams are speedy. They are also morphing and adapting extremely quickly, likely in reaction to the responses they're getting from the writers they target.
This post takes a look at the adaptations I'm seeing now.
A year ago, a group of authors filed suit against AI company Anthropic over its creation of an enormous library of digitized books to train its Claude LLMs, arguing that because Anthropic did not seek authors’ permission for the creation of the library or for AI training on the included works (claiming, as most AI companies do, that this constituted fair use), Anthropic's actions constituted copyright infringment. (You can see the original complaint here.)
In addition to purchasing and scanning physical books, Anthropic also downloaded millions of books and other works illegally uploaded to pirate sites. This past June, the judge in the case, Judge William Alsup, determined that while Anthropic’s digitzation of physical books, and its use of these for AI training, did indeed qualify as fair use, its downloading of pirated copies did not.
Accordingly, Judge Alsup certified a class of LibGen & PiLiMi Pirated Books authors (LibGen is pirate site Library Genesis; PiLiMi is pirate site Pirate Library Mirror), consisting of "all beneficial or legal copyright owners" whose work both possesses an ISBN or ASIN, and was registered with the US Copyright Office within 5 years of publication and before being downloaded by Anthropic (August 10, 2022).
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a rising and extremely prolific marketing scam that I've been able to trace back to operators in Nigeria.
Using highly personalized (AI-generated) email solicitations that make it seem the sender (always with a Gmail address, always presenting as a marketing or PR expert) has really read the book, the scammer offers marketing services of various kinds, usually for a not-exorbitant fee of a few hundred dollars. If the author bites, they're referred to a Nigerian "assistant" or "payment processor" on Upwork or Fiverr for payment. The scammer then demands access to the author's KDP account.
I've since discovered two new and distinct iterations of this scam--both of which, like the first one, have appeared abruptly and spun up very fast.
