Thus, I stand to receive about $9,000 as a result of this settlement.
I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out. Also, while I'm sure that Anthropic has benefited from training its models on this dataset, that doesn't necessarily mean that those models are a lasting asset.
While I'm sure it feels good and validating to have this called copyright infringement, and be compensated, it's a mixed blessing at best. Remember, this also means that your works will owe compensation to anyone you "trained" off of. Once we accept that simply "learning from previous copyrighted works to make new ones" is "infringement", then the onus is on you to establish a clean creation chain, because you'll be vulnerable to the exact same argument, and you will owe compensation to anyone whose work you looked at in learning your craft.
This point was made earlier in this blog post:
https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2025/04/03/why-training-ai-can...
HN discussion of the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43663941
[0] not because we're so amazingly more creative. But because copyright is a legal invention, not something derived from first principles, and has been defined to only apply to human creations. It could be changed to apply to LLM output in the future.
It's not, because LLMs are not making new copyrightable works.
To make a copyrightable work you must put some creative act into it. Just copying someone else's work does not enable you to claim copyright. But LLMs cannot put creative work into their works, because only humans are capable of copyrightable creation - so therefore it is infringing.