Protecting Your Intellectual Property: What You Need to Know About Copyright; Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), September 11, 2025

 Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware®, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) ; Protecting Your Intellectual Property: What You Need to Know About Copyright

"Copyright is a complex subject about which there are many misconceptions.

I was reminded of that this week, thanks to an email from an author who discovered that several of their books were included in one of the databases of pirated works used by the AI company Anthropic for AI training. The author wanted to know whether they were eligible to be part of the gigantic $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic has agreed to pay to compensate writers for its misuse of their intellectual property. (You can read more about the lawsuit, and the settlement, here.)

One of the criteria for eligibility, set by the court, is that copyrights to the pirated works must have been properly registered with the US Copyright Office before Anthropic downloaded the databases. And indeed, the author’s books were all registered in a timely manner…but not with the Copyright Office. Instead, the author used a website called Copyrighted.com, which offers a kind of faux registration using timestamps and its own certificates.

I had to tell the author that no, they weren’t eligible for compensation for their pirated books. In the United States, there’s no equivalent or substitute for the US Copyright Office’s official registration process. The author couldn’t even use the materials they’d gotten from Coprighted.com as prima facie evidence of copyright ownership. Again, only official registration provides that.

In this article, I’m going to cover the basics of copyright, offer some warnings, and dispel some myths. I know that much of what follows will be familiar to a lot of readers—but as the example above shows, knowledge gaps not only exist, but can be damaging…and as always in the writing biz, knowledge is your greatest ally and your best defense. I hope even the most copyright-savvy readers will find something useful here."