00:03:51.880Yes, I want to know from the very beginning how this all played out.
00:03:56.560So you probably remember when The Atlantic released a searchable database,
00:04:01.840and it was the first time that we could sort of poke around.
00:04:04.420The average person, including authors, could poke around in these massive data sets, these massive trove of pirated books that existed online that we knew various AI companies had downloaded and used to train their chatbots, right?
00:04:19.880Because these algorithms need quality training material.
00:04:24.680And so they decided to just lift pirated books and use those.
00:04:29.420And so this is, I think, 2022 or 2023.
00:04:32.660It was like when ChatGPT had been released, but we didn't, it was still new.
00:04:36.920We still didn't really know where, how these things came about.
00:05:00.680I'm sure you've had, you know, you're a world traveler too. I'm sure you've had other instances
00:05:04.740of brushes with your possessions. But this just felt so different, right? Because our books are
00:05:11.880almost like an extension of us. There's so much mental labor and emotional labor and like blood,
00:05:17.240sweat and tears that goes into these books. And so to just know it had been stolen and used for
00:05:22.720the exclusive, explicit purpose of making a tech company very, very rich and ultimately like
00:05:29.800creating products to compete with ours in the marketplace made me really mad. Made a lot of
00:05:35.140other people mad too, I am sure. But I'm really bad at just sitting by, just dealing with it when
00:05:40.360I'm mad. That's one of the things that I love the most about you, and I love a lot of things about
00:05:44.420you. Well, thank you. So my next step was, okay, what do I do with this? I mean, to a fault,
00:05:50.320I'm always like, okay, well, how do I fix it or do something? And not too long after that,
00:05:55.760we learned that there was going to be this big lawsuit that involved Sarah Silverman and George
00:06:01.720R.R. Martin and Jonathan Franzen and just tons and tons of huge names suing OpenAI for exactly
00:06:09.900this, for OpenAI, which is the creator of ChatGPT, using their stolen stuff to create, you know,
00:06:18.140to create a product without consent or licensing. And I was like, I want to be involved. So I poked
00:06:25.000around, I found the name of one of the law firms that had filed this class action lawsuit. And I
00:06:31.380just sent a note explaining that, you know, my books were in there. If there was any way to be
00:06:35.340involved, like, please keep me in mind. I heard nothing. I like came to understand that, you know,
00:06:39.920all class members, anyone whose book was stolen and used is going to be a part of the class without
00:06:44.700having to send an email like I did. But at the time I was like, I need to do something very active.
00:06:50.420So I heard nothing. That started to, you know, we all started sort of keeping an eye on that as it slowly worked its way through the, you know, Byzantine and Levinthine world of law.
00:07:00.500and in August of 2024 I got an email sort of out of the blue from that law firm and they explained
00:07:09.760that they were considering filing a class action lawsuit against Anthropic the maker of Claude
00:07:16.060which is another one of the big you know AI chatbot creators that was going to be really
00:07:22.700similar it was going to be sort of the same you know allegations for what the company had done
00:07:26.940and would I be interested in being a named plaintiff now I know nothing about the law
00:07:32.060I was like what is a named plaintiff let's yeah I mean this is why I'm so impressed by you because
00:07:38.960I know nothing about the law right so I'm just like wow like what what does any of this mean
00:07:45.120how does how does any of it work these were all of my questions too but like you I am you know a
00:07:51.180journalist by trade. And so I sort of interviewed them. I talked to a number of people at the law
00:07:57.440firm. I did a lot of reading on my own. I had a long call with my agent, who was a lawyer in a
00:08:05.920past life, too. But, you know, she pointed out some things to think about. She helped me look
00:08:12.040into the law firms themselves. Are these like scammy ambulance chasers or are these legit law
00:08:17.340firm. It was two law firms working together. And, you know, I thought about all of the trade-offs,
00:08:24.460all of the sort of invasions of privacy that would come with discovery and with kind of handing over
00:08:28.980the keys to an intermediary, not to Anthropic, but to a security firm for my, you know, my messages
00:08:37.340and my social media accounts and my email and everything else. And ultimately, I was like,
00:08:43.700okay i care about this cause a lot i have a lot of privilege i don't and really never sexted that
00:08:51.240was a big one and so i was like i should use my privilege to to do this to to do something that
00:08:57.440matters and to stand up for myself but authors and creators everywhere too so i said you know
00:09:04.020what the hell i'm in um so months past i the discovery process began um which again there
00:09:12.120was sort of a security firm in between that was in charge of answering discovery requests and
00:09:17.880producing emails related to different things and all of my contracts so I ended up doing a lot of
00:09:23.660even though they technically had access to everything I had to dig up a lot of stuff myself
00:09:28.220and like Joe it wasn't that long ago that we like got contracts in the mail and signed them and sent
00:09:35.740them back like I didn't have signed copies of stuff because oh I know it's it's fascinating
00:09:41.380actually because christine needed a signed copy or just a copy of our contract today
00:09:46.100and they don't come anymore it's bananas yeah trying to find some of this stuff was like i
00:09:53.020don't freaking know and yeah royalty reports for some reason like in the author portal you can't
00:09:59.300view past ones i was like i don't know where that could possibly be so a long time i was devoted to
00:10:04.340you know pulling together paperwork and boring things like that um i was aware that there were
00:10:09.660two other lead plaintiffs alongside me, and they were both nonfiction authors that I had
00:10:16.600sort of heard of their books, but I didn't know them. It was Charles Graber, who wrote The Good
00:10:20.640Nurse, among other books, which became a Netflix series, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who, among other
00:10:26.860books, wrote The Feather Thief. And so I really didn't have interaction with them during this
00:10:32.240period, but they will become, you know, crucial characters later in the story. So I want to shout
00:10:36.880them out early on. I got through much of the discovery, a lot of back and forth with, you know,
00:10:44.240via my lawyers with Anthropics lawyers. And then I found out that I was being deposed just a few0.56
00:10:50.340days later in San Francisco. And because I do business as a corporation, I was suing on behalf
00:10:58.100of both the corporation and myself, the individual. So they were able to sit me down for an eight hour
00:11:04.660deposition, four hours for the individual and four hours for the company. And it meant that I
00:11:11.600would be sitting down. And I didn't realize this. When a deposition begins, the person who's being
00:11:18.420deposed is not allowed to speak really at all or certainly anything of substance with their own
00:11:25.640counsel because that could be considered coaching. Oh, I didn't know this. And I watch a lot of Law
00:11:33.000in order yeah this is something i had never seen portrayed before so once it begins and they like
00:11:38.460start the recording and and you know you you raise your hand and swear your lawyer you're on your own
00:11:45.000whatever wherever that other lawyer wants to take this conversation like your lawyer can of course
00:11:49.780object they can um advise you not to answer something but they can't you know discuss
00:11:55.800anything so i flew out to san francisco where we were suing because that's where anthropic is based
00:12:02.440We had debate prep where not debate prep, but what do you call it?
00:12:06.340Deposition prep and talked about what they might ask.
00:12:09.460And and of course, the guiding light was just like, be honest.
00:12:12.720And I actually wasn't that nervous because I felt like I had sort of the sort of justice and truth on my side.
00:12:19.420Like, there's no way that they could construe anything that I had said in the past or would say in the future that would suddenly, in my mind, point to.
00:12:28.940Yeah, it's cool that you stole our stuff. And that was what was at heart in this in this lawsuit. Right. We were saying it's not OK that you downloaded knowingly pirated copies of our books.
00:12:43.760So, right. I mean, but because all of this is so new and I'm putting on my reporter hat right now, can they try to argue for weird legal gray area? And what was their what was their defense?
00:12:58.940Yeah. Yeah. So a few things happen. And now I'm not totally positive of was this before or after the deposition? A few things happen. So there were three main things that we were claiming in suing. And it was a that they had knowingly taken pirated copies of our books. It was B that they had made copies of made copies of them without consent or permission. It's illegal to copy a copyrighted thing. Right.
00:13:24.620um and then what is the third thing oh my gosh i've talked about this so much that i'm missing
00:13:30.020oh the fact that they the fact that they uh sped it into their algorithm without our consent
00:13:35.960um was and and you know we're claiming that that was fair use because it was transformative
00:13:41.600we didn't think that that was true so the judge that these sort of three charges were assigned to
00:13:48.940actually agreed with anthropic on the latter two which we very much disagree with him about um he
00:13:55.940said that because what they did to make a copy and this is the same thing that happened in the
00:14:00.780google books case they um realized right we know this now from discovery that it wasn't maybe great
00:14:08.560that they were using these um pirated copies and so pay paid millions of dollars to go out and buy
00:14:16.160a huge collection of library of uh books to to create their own quote library
00:14:21.320that was physical books mostly secondhand so they the author didn't see a dime for that but they
00:14:28.900bought these books physically and they physically so they physically they physically go i just like
00:14:33.920this is fascinating to me so they physically go and buy a bunch of books and then how did they
00:14:38.960feed them into the system well let me tell you joe so there's photos of it that are that are
00:14:45.500under seal, and so we saw them in Discovery, but let me try to describe it. They paid thousands
00:14:51.920of people to stand in a warehouse. It looked like a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark,
00:14:57.800as my co-lead plaintiff pointed out. To stand there, they took an X-Acto knife and stripped
00:15:03.340off the spine of each book, and then they used a scanner to scan page by page every
00:15:12.360page with this destroyed book um and in uploading that they created a quote digital library
00:15:18.520wow but they still don't have the rights well the judge whom i disagree with very heavily said that
00:15:24.680because they purchased one book and then destroyed that book in creating their digital copy that's
00:15:30.260plus one minus one that's not that's a that's a net nothing and because those books were legally
00:15:36.640obtained, he said that that was fine. I disagree for a lot of reasons. One really obvious one is
00:15:42.480that libraries don't get to do that. Libraries have to pay a licensing fee to lend out an e-book
00:15:49.520or an audio book. They can't just pick up a use, you know, go to a little free library and then
00:15:55.000scan and upload that book and, you know, loan it out as an e-book. But I digress. Those are my
00:16:01.720personal feelings um the judge also declared that it was fair use for them to feed these books into
00:16:08.780their algorithm because it was no different from a student reading a lot of books in order to learn
00:16:16.940how to write and to create his own books and so he considered this transformative which is uh which
00:16:24.760falls under the fair use doctrine we were those things i i mean i also i also disagree with them
00:16:32.360i'm not a lawyer i am a journalist who you know has taken many many journalism ethics courses
00:16:38.660and this does not seem like fair use to me at all uh because just because the book was physically
00:16:46.480transformed does not change the words that were used. But again, I'm not, I'm not a lawyer.
00:16:55.280This is fascinating to me. It is fascinating. A lot of people disagree. There's lots of other
00:17:02.200lawsuits, obviously, and we are very hopeful that one of them will side with what I consider
00:17:07.740logic, which is to say that a company gobbling up, you know, having an algorithm gobble up
00:17:13.980millions and millions of books in order to create a competitive product uh meant to make this company
00:17:19.880worth billions of dollars is very different from a school child like reading you know a tony morrison
00:17:26.420book and a charles dickens book and whatever in the course of freshman english um part of the
00:17:32.760argument was well it's not that it's not outputting the exact uh entire book so it's not like making
00:17:40.700You know, you can't, I guess, ask it to provide all of The Lost Night by Andrea Bartz and have it give you the whole book.
00:17:48.900However, we from the start have been like, this is an input case, not an output case.
00:20:47.540Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this had to do this had to be just like low wage, like, you know, factory work, essentially.
00:20:55.300It's I don't know. It's mind blowing. Just just think about it.
00:20:58.740Like hundreds of thousands of books just being chopped.
00:21:02.860Part of it is just this like thing in my chest of, oh, my God, these these books somebody put their heart and souls into.
00:21:09.960It's such a like literal it's such an obvious metaphor.
00:21:13.100It's a little on the nose. Rip them apart so that they could cover their asses.1.00
00:21:17.540and make themselves richer I think that's that's what's going on yeah I yeah yeah I don't it does0.99
00:21:26.360sound like a scene out of Raiders of the Lost Ark where we're yes it's it's blowing my mind it truly
00:21:32.140is so okay the case the case is continuing the case is continuing and and to your point you at
00:21:40.060you asked a really astute question before about um sort of what their claims were going to be
00:21:44.340And my sort of takeaways from the line of questioning had to do with them. I think the argument that they were making was that it is, it would be perhaps impractical, they said, they were implying, for them to figure out who the copyright owner of every single one of these works was, get their permission, get their consent, set up a licensing deal with them.
00:22:09.680And sort of for proof of that, they were, you know, showing, pulling up emails between my agent and my editor and myself trying to figure out because I have a corporation, like, should the copyright be registered differently from the flow through corporation, this and that.
00:22:28.940And I just kind of said, you know, but you can go to copyright.gov and it says right there who ultimately the copyright owner is.
00:22:36.620So I don't actually think it's that confusing.
00:22:39.680And then I mean, it can be confusing when you're creating a new product. I've gone through this before. But at the same time, is it more difficult than buying a lot of books and stripping them and feeding them into a scanner? I don't know. I don't know the answer.
00:22:56.820Yeah. And the thing is, it also feels like the right thing to do. And for me, I don't even want to get into any of the, is AI good or bad or how should people use it? Will writers use it? Because that's besides the point of this conversation.
00:23:22.820a lot of people have such strong opinions of it this conversation just has to do with
00:23:27.940writers wrote something shouldn't they get paid if it's being used exactly exactly you just
00:23:36.700distilled it i mean without our there's this phrase in tech garbage in garbage out
00:23:42.040and without really high quality texts like the chatbots wouldn't be good the reason that they're
00:23:48.920so good at mimicking human speech is because they were trained on our stuff. So if our books were so
00:23:56.540essential to the creation of this multi-multi-multi-multi-billion-dollar valued product,
00:24:06.760why should we not see it die? It just doesn't make sense. You can't steal all the materials
00:24:11.580to build a house and then say, oh, but it's not materials anymore. It's a house. So I didn't have
00:24:16.560to actually pay for any of that. Right. It's now transformative. And even when someone is looking
00:24:23.520to turn our products into a television show and it hasn't even been made yet, but they just want
00:24:29.160the ability to talk about making it, you still have to pay an option fee. Exactly. Exactly. I
00:24:35.180mean, all sorts of different licensing, all sorts of different. And, you know, by the way, not to
00:24:40.160Another thing worth mentioning is that there are licensing deals going on, and they happen from the start.
00:24:52.920HarperCollins did that nonfiction deal with books.
00:24:55.400Like, there are models of AI companies getting consent and having an opt-in licensing platform to obtain training materials that get fed into the algorithm.
00:25:07.840So just that whole move fast, break shit mentality that is, you know, very endemic to tech pros and to that whole world definitely took over here.
00:25:19.080And it's just to me from the beginning, I knew it wasn't right.0.97
00:25:22.940And I held on to that throughout the crazy ride of this of this lawsuit.
00:25:30.320When you were going through this, did you feel very exposed?
00:25:33.400Because in Discovery, they get to go through your emails and stuff, right?
00:25:37.840Yeah. Yeah. I probably the most exposed I felt was when I was sitting in that meeting room with the best lawyers that money can buy, I would imagine, with Anthropics lawyers. And they were just, you know, I mean, I introduce, you know, exhibit whatever into the into the record and they would put in front of me a printout of one of my emails.
00:25:59.560Um, and it was, you know, a back and forth with my agent with, with jokes and with this
00:26:05.100and that, and with, um, maybe eye rolling about someone else in the business or something,
00:26:09.420but it had something to do with issues of copyright or, or contracts or licensing or
00:27:59.840How does all of this ultimately shake out?
00:28:03.300So the next big thing that happened was a call that I got from from my counsel, from
00:28:11.320one of the lawyers that was like, this is extremely, extremely confidential, but we
00:28:15.660might have we might be getting close to a settlement um and we knew that that was a
00:28:21.700possibility we knew that the majority of class action lawsuits end in a settlement rather than
00:28:27.440going to court but we were also ready to go to court we had a court date um we it was on my
00:28:33.040calendar it's actually a gosh it was first weekend of december so i think it was it was coming right
00:28:38.420up and this was um this was sometime in august of 2025 um so sort of like okay keep me posted
00:28:48.400keep us posted um and then not you know i kept getting updates throughout of you know there was
00:28:54.940you know the the mediators helping everyone with it and and a lot of people coming to the table
00:28:59.980and disagreeing about things and um finally we found out that there was a proposed um settlement
00:29:07.740on the table for $1.5 billion. And we got sort of the broad picture of the numbers. It was for
00:29:14.460up to 300,000 books that were included in this case. And it would be, you know, our class was
00:29:25.400both authors and publishers. Actually, the judge was the one who brought publishers into the tent
00:29:30.820so that um anthropic wouldn't be left open later to um okay we settled this but we we dealt with
00:29:38.000all this but then the publishers show up and sue them for the same thing like for it to be fair
00:29:41.900the judge thought um publishers and authors together needed to be part of this class
00:29:46.580um so that was part of his his his reasoning and certifying the class so we found out that um there
00:29:54.120was this offer on the table that was and at first i didn't really know what to make of 1.5 billion
00:29:58.640like that sounded like a lot and then we I literally used like the calculator on my phone
00:30:03.820and I was like okay that's like about five grand a book that's not nothing that's not life-changing
00:30:09.900um and I did a little more research on my own of like okay what are the biggest tech settlements
00:30:16.900in history and it was just such a different scale it was hundreds of millions for Facebook and
00:30:23.860Google for other things so this would really be in a class of its own and it wasn't long before
00:30:28.560I learned, I guess, from counsel that this was the largest, this would be the largest
00:30:35.340copyright settlement in history, in the history of copyright law, which really felt like something
00:30:41.580to be proud of. So this was also when the other two, I mean, plaintiffs and I kind of connected
00:30:48.260for the first time. We had all been on here and there. We had been on Zooms together and stuff,
00:30:54.140but we hadn't really spoken to each other individually.
00:30:58.020And this is where the three of us kind of got together to discuss, like, is this, like,
00:31:01.860how do we do, how do we do right for our fellow authors?
00:31:04.940Because I absolutely understand the arguments that, you know, oh, this is too low.
00:31:11.980Oh, if you're so sure you're on the right, you should have gone to trial.
00:31:16.220You should have held up for more, this and that.
00:31:18.200I understand all of that, but for a number of reasons, including that the vast majority of copyright cases settle for $750 a work, and this is four times that, as well as the fact that going to court, even winning, guarantees nothing.
00:31:36.300If you bankrupt the company, then you never see the money.
00:31:39.140If you win and they appeal and it goes back and forth and back and forth, you can never see the money.
00:31:43.380if it reaches the Supreme Court. I personally don't have that much faith in the Supreme Court
00:31:47.780to do the right thing these days. There were a lot of unknowns that would come with not
00:31:52.440taking the settlement. And so we ultimately decided, especially knowing that this was going
00:31:58.240to be the first major kind of ruling and settlement having to do with artists via AI,
00:32:06.600that it was a really good first corrective step. And it wouldn't set legal precedent,
00:32:11.020But it would sort of be the first time that a guardrail and a consequence was applied to an AI company and that it would hopefully set the stage for all of these other lawsuits, dozens of other lawsuits, you know, winding their way through the courts to finally for the first time start showing AI that they're not above the law, right?
00:32:34.300Showing big tech that like there are consequences and authors are not powerless.
00:32:37.820um so we you know signed on to this settlement it got announced which was of course a big day
00:32:45.200on a little flurry of of news coverage and stuff um and it felt almost like that was
00:32:50.640the big triumphant moment but it turned out for us that the hard work had really just begun
00:32:56.040because um we had a preliminary approval uh hearing in san francisco which we all flew out for
00:33:04.520And everyone kind of just expected the judge to like, yep, okay, Anthropic's happy. You guys are happy. Great. This is preliminary. So go forth, make it work.
00:33:15.600And instead, to everyone's surprise, he was like, this is not nearly enough detail. I need to know all of the details of the plan for allocation, the plan for notice, the plan for, you know, how it's going to work for different classes of authors.
00:33:35.740There's educational authors. There's different kinds of contracts. Like how is there how is sort of conflict resolution going to work if the publisher and the author disagrees? What if there's multiple authors on a book? What if it's an anthology? He wanted all of this figured out in time for a new preliminary approval hearing that he scheduled for just like less than two weeks later.
00:33:59.660and for context in the in the case of large class action lawsuits usually the lawyers or often I
00:34:07.140guess I should say the lawyers have months and months and months to sort out all these details
00:34:11.100and suddenly they had something like two weeks and so the next few weeks became really intense
00:34:19.760for myself and again Charles Graber and Kirk Wallace Johnson the other authors because
00:34:24.980we were the only ones who knew we felt a big responsibility to be involved in everything
00:34:30.560to we had to write things we had to look over things we had to make suggestions we had to
00:34:37.400consider it from the perspective of how would this read would this make sense to a trade author
00:34:43.220would this make sense to a you know an educational author would this make sense to a self-published
00:34:49.020author um we debated things we talked to all the different parties we tried to be really good and
00:34:56.860really fair representatives for the entire class which included publishers which none of us you
00:35:01.660know are personally um publishers ourselves right we're we're technically ourselves all trade
00:35:08.680authors which was a minority of the books in the in that um works list of hundreds of thousands of
00:35:15.140books. We, you know, I spent an hour on the phone with a data scientist trying to understand exactly
00:35:20.960where this works list came from and like how rock solid was it and how could we create an FAQ so
00:35:26.020that other authors would understand how rock solid this is too, knowing that it is not as large or
00:35:31.580as inclusive as, for example, what's in the Atlantic searchable database. So we were pulling 40,
00:35:38.50050 60 hour weeks for about a month from late August to late September and became really close
00:35:46.780even though we had barely known each other before that but three of us were texting all day every
00:35:53.400day if one of us couldn't make a meeting you know somebody else was live sort of live texting to
00:35:58.840keep them up to speed really trying to think everything through from a fair-minded perspective
00:36:03.560So I do want to throw a spotlight on how it's called Barts the Anthropic because my name is forced in the alphabet, but they did exactly as much work as I did.
00:36:14.020And and I really, you know, they deserve just as much thanks and credit as I do.
00:36:20.780And then in the end of September, we flew back out for a final or excuse me, another second preliminary approval hearing.
00:36:28.960and um thank god the judge went ahead and uh granted it so the next stage was um moving on to
00:36:40.280releasing to the public this works list um the claims system which you and i were talking about
00:36:47.980before we started recording um making sure that everything worked everything was clear as clear
00:36:53.400as it could be considering you know lawsuit stuff is sort of confusing okay let's take another
00:36:58.880quick break. And then I want to hear how authors can actually file these claims or even collect
00:37:05.340this money. I want to know how it all works. I want to date with Rawls, Carty says. Rawls?
00:37:15.680Rucker asks. This is the love story of real hinged couple Carty and Rucker.
00:37:21.000Written and read by me, Nicola Dynan. Listen to the free audiobook now.
00:37:38.120Yeah, so I am monologuing in a big way.
00:37:41.100But right now, where we're at is that we don't have final approval.
00:37:45.480The lawsuit is not, like, done, signed, sealed, delivered.
00:37:48.200But we're in a notice period where people whose books are likely included in that works list of about 500,000 books are finding out about it, hopefully finding out about this lawsuit, and they're able to look up their book in the works list and file a claim.
00:38:06.640So what authors need to do if they would like to be involved or if they would like to opt out, although I very much encourage people to remain in the suit, I think it is a very good deal, is they should go to anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com.
00:38:52.680So people are also getting emails that are, you know, tell them to go ahead and check
00:38:57.560and file a claim if they want to be a part of it.
00:39:00.740Soon, I think direct notice is going to go out via the mail.
00:39:03.440You'll get something in the mail. Right now, we are just trying to, I should say, the lawyers are trying to make everyone who has who's part of the class, who's a quote absent class member, publishers and authors, to make them all aware of this lawsuit so that they can, you know, get their damages and and collect the money that they are owed from Anthropik.
00:39:27.780Well, yeah, I mean, I've checked the list. My books are on the list. Nick helped me fill out all of the forms because he's better at that than I am. And he's officially my COO of Influential Media.
00:39:40.780And, you know, it wasn't easy, but it also wasn't hard. And like you said earlier, I do think the important thing here is to set precedence in a world where technology is truly changing everything about how we function in life.
00:40:01.300And there are so many people that are making such outsized paychecks on a lot of these things that it's really that it's really important to wade through this what is currently a legal gray area.
00:40:17.660It truly is. Yeah. Yeah. And it's we can't wait for laws to be set to regulate this.
00:40:24.760that's that's not going to work like the law is moving so the you know congress is like a lot of
00:40:33.000old people who bless them are not going to be in the business of getting ahead of the technology
00:40:38.620that has the ability to completely shape our future in fact big tech the people who are
00:40:43.840creating and are counting on it being the most influential you know force and and technology
00:40:50.020ever created so we need to jump on it now all we can and like put those guardrails in place in order
00:40:57.380to create a future where big tech doesn't just feel like they are running the show and like i
00:41:05.860said above the law right and i mean i'm thinking back a little bit 20 25 years ago when digital
00:41:15.960media was still a legal gray area when it came to journalism, when it came to copyright, when it
00:41:23.260came to what images you could use, right? I mean, I'm thinking about the early days of blogging,
00:41:28.440and then when blogging became media actually putting things online, it was a really confusing
00:41:35.200time for a lot of people. And I do not think that there were enough actual laws passed to clear up
00:41:45.240any of the questions that a lot of people had, a lot of this did end up resting on legal precedent.
00:41:51.800Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Absolutely. And like that's it's like we know that big tech isn't going to stop
00:41:57.660because it's suddenly the right thing to do. I mean, I can say that pretty confidently. You can
00:42:02.600disagree. Anyone can disagree if they want. But like, it's pretty clear that profit is king and
00:42:07.860profit is you know you know somebody just shared with me a quote of um how do how do uh ai companies
00:42:16.620see a person like slowly descending into ai psychosis they see another long-term user there's
00:42:23.360just they don't have our best interest at heart i'm sorry i don't think they do and so like we
00:42:30.020need to find ways to stand up for what we think is right and the kind of relationship that we want
00:42:37.520big tech to have with society and you know it's funny you mentioned 20 25 years ago these big
00:42:44.060questions about copyright because um i somebody who went to my high school was one of those people
00:42:51.460sued for having stolen albums off of napster for some absurd amount he was like a 17 year old kid
00:42:57.700remember that oh my god i remember those cases yeah absolutely we were making an example of
00:43:02.560individual people who had downloaded stuff which like of course we should not have you should not
00:43:06.500steal albums either we should not be pirating anything we should be paying artists but you know
00:43:12.060individual kids were getting charged hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for stealing
00:43:18.180something and now look how the tables have turned ai companies are stealing millions of books and
00:43:25.060they're claiming that it's fine because they're using them for to create something new or whatever
00:43:30.460Like, the issue here is the, in my opinion, like extremely egregious and bald faced theft that's going on. And it's important that this become just the first of many corrective actions taken.
00:43:47.460And I think consequences in the form of, you know, money and settlements and damages are how these companies learn.
00:44:00.160Another thing I want to point out, because this is really important, is that this settlement does not in any way give Anthropic any future ability to use your book.
00:44:11.920they have agreed to destroy their digital library of pirated copies, and this does not constitute
00:44:18.360any sort of ongoing license or agreement that they can use it. So I think that is something
00:44:24.920I have heard that's incorrect, and I just want to be really clear about that. It is simply damages
00:44:28.820for the fact that sometime in, I think, 2021, they downloaded your book illegally without your
00:44:34.940permission. Right. So it's a very, very specific in it's a very, very specific incident, which I
00:44:43.660think it has to be for for for the for these kinds of things to to actually make sense, to actually
00:44:50.420work legally. It has to be this is the exact thing. Again, in my mind. I get that these machines are
00:44:59.080going to be trained. I'm like I am of the mind. I'm like the train has left the station. OK,
00:45:03.380This is how I think about social media, too. We are living with these. OK, I we cannot go crawl under a rock. But there should absolutely be some form of licensing. Everyone else has to license something to use anything in this world.
00:45:18.380Right. Right. Right. Like, I can't. Right. There's tons of examples. Like, we deal other things. I mean, one of my favorite memes about the whole thing after, and you'll appreciate this, after the Louvre heist was some joke headline that was something like, you know, all charges dropped against Louvre thieves after they explained that they were stealing these materials to train an AI algorithm.
00:45:42.980right I mean yes oh those Louvre thieves I love those guys I really do love those Louvre thieves
00:45:52.760I was in the Louvre a couple weeks ago and first off they're selling an art heist version of Clue
00:45:59.960in all of the gift shops and I'm like who is in on this joke or are you just totally clueless
00:46:04.940I mean I bought it obviously and the hardest like the Louvre itself has no security in it whatsoever
00:46:12.520except for the ability to just buy an online ticket that took me 30 minutes 30 minutes to
00:46:18.840buy my online ticket and yet and yet i don't think i saw a single security guard when i was in there
00:46:23.280but you know it just makes it really strengthens uh the plot of the parisian heist i'm like anyone
00:46:28.580could do this i'm like i thought i was a little worried that i didn't nail it but i totally nailed
00:46:33.180it no if anyone's like i don't know if that's realistic you can be like listen listen these
00:46:39.520guys did me a real solid by proving that it is okay real solid well this has been amazing i'm
00:46:46.400just proud of you like i'm proud of you for going through this for being such a trailblazer
00:46:50.400you're aaron brokovich essentially um obviously we don't want julia roberts to play you in the
00:46:55.340movie because we hate her over in our house but i would like someone really hot and really cool
00:47:01.320to play you when this when this movie is made and i'd like that i'd like them to pay a lot of money
00:47:05.300to license your story i would love all of that yeah so if anyone's out there looking for a story
00:47:10.780to license you know who to call i think i think we have i personally think we have a really
00:47:14.800attractive little trio of lead plaintiffs i think charlie and kirk are adorable as well so
00:47:19.640we would be a great little trio to profile to you know i mean you you know how to write a screenplay
00:47:26.220i know how to write a screenplay let's just get this done okay let's make this happen exactly i
00:47:32.400love it well thank you so much for being on will you tell everyone where they can find your books
00:47:37.500your most recent book and also where they can subscribe to your sub stack because honestly if
00:47:42.900anyone wants to thank andy for this kind of work it's it's buying her books it's buying her work
00:47:49.680it's paying for her sub stack and i think that's really really important it's obviously not why she
00:47:54.460did this but that is an author's lifeblood and i know that a lot of people are like oh my gosh i
00:47:59.340want to thank this person buy her wonderful books ah thank you so much joe um yeah it's been wild
00:48:05.500so many authors have been like i have 20 books in there i have i'm so excited i'm gonna get all
00:48:10.540this money like what can i do to thank you and i'm like well you could take a small portion of that
00:48:14.460you know 25 grand or whatever that you're about to get and you could spend 18 on a paperback of
00:48:20.140mine but they never do so i appreciate you saying that that is very kind um you can check me out on
00:48:26.780my substack. It's andybarts.substack.com. It's called Get It Right, W-R-I-T-E. I guess it doesn't
00:48:33.440translate that well to podcasts, but it's all sorts of publishing intel and dishy author interviews
00:48:39.480and behind-the-scenes author-life stuff for aspiring and current authors. My most recent
00:48:45.100book is called The Last Ferry Out. It is a scorching island whodunit. I have four other
00:48:51.180books. My best-selling one, which was a Reese pick, it's called We Were Never Here, and that's
00:48:56.360about two globetrotting best friends who kill a backpacker in self-defense while they're away on
00:49:02.600their travels. But it's not the first time that one of their trips has ended in bloodshed. I love
00:49:07.760exploring, you know, feminist psychological thrillers, juicy, interesting relationships
00:49:12.920between women, queer representation in a number, not all, but many of them. So yeah, if people are
00:49:20.180looking for a, you know, poolside or cozy on the sofa under a blanket kind of read. I think my books
00:49:28.260will take care of you this winter. They definitely will. Thank you so much for everything that you're
00:49:33.620doing and for chatting with me today. Thanks so much, Jill. Always love chatting with you.