Just Discovered That My Publisher Never Fulfilled A Key Contract Obligation From 4 Years Ago, Leading To Potential Losses

LOCATION: NEW YORK

So this is a situation that was rather unusual and unheard of until recently.

I'm the author of four books, and two of these books were likely pirated by Anthropic, OpenAI, and the other tech companies that have been pirating millions of books from LibGen for AI training. (My books in question were found in the LibGen dataset.) A class action lawsuit filed by a team of authors recently resulted in a settlement from Anthropic, which will be disbursed to authors whose copyrighted works were pirated during the period of time covered by the lawsuit. And a lot of authors, including me, are now learning something shocking as we inquite about our eligibility for a class payment.

Our publishers never fulfilled their contractual obligation to register some of our books with the U.S. Copyright Office!

One of my books in the LibGen dataset does not appear to have ever been registered by the publisher. It should have been registered in 2021 within 90 days of publishing, per the contract language. And the contract doesn't give any wiggle room for not doing so. This is such a basic publisher duty that I think it's safe to say that most authors don't actually double-check to make sure the copyright has been certified. But it appears that a lot of publishers have dropped the ball on this front. This probably cost a lot of us the chance to be included in the Anthropic settlement. And it could also hamper our eligibility for other class action suits like it, such as the one against OpenAI.

At the moment, I'm getting in touch with my publisher to understand why and how this could have happened, and to begin discussing remediation. I would like to avoid legal action and find a way to repair the damage, as I have continued to work with the publisher and I have a project with them on the table right now. But at the same time, I'm so shaken and angry about this that I'm thinking about whether I can even continue to work with the publisher, if they refuse to take accountability.

If that happens, then I would consider legal action. I just don't know what that could look like, and whether suing for breach of contract in a case like this would yield enough to justify the legal costs and loss of current work.