If you wrote and published a book about domain names, you might expect some fresh money at some point.
Not because of more sales; most domain-related books become obsolete a few years later, but because of a class action lawsuit filed against Anthropic—an American AI safety and research company, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei, and structured as a public benefit corporation.
Operating from the domain Anthropic.com (and another, less known one) the company focuses on building large language models under the Claude brand, aiming to make them reliable, interpretable, and steerable, with safety baked into the design.
A copyright lawsuit showed that the company not only trained its Claude models on lawfully purchased books, but also built a huge “central library” of pirated texts and destructively scanned millions of physical books for training data.
Court filings and reporting describe Anthropic cutting the bindings off millions of print books, scanning them, then discarding the originals, and also downloading over 7 million copyrighted works from shadow libraries like LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror.
A federal judge ruled that using lawfully acquired books for training could be fair use but that mass copying and storage of pirated books was clear infringement, leading to a class-action case (Bartz v. Anthropic) and a proposed $1.5 billion settlement under which Anthropic agreed to destroy the pirated data, fueling a broader debate about how AI firms source training corpora and what “responsible” AI development really means.
With all that being said, the official class action lawsuit web site is AnthropicCopyrightSettlement.com. It can be searched by title, author, and ISBN number for published books.
If you find your domain book (or any book you authored) on that massive, searchable catalog, chances are that you can be part of the Anthropic lawsuit class.
Here’s what searching for “Domain Names” returns from the Anthropic Class Action lawsuit web site:
A couple of these books were published 20 to 25 years ago.
Keep in mind that if you signed out your rights to a book publisher, they have to file and not you.
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