The court has to give preliminary approval to the settlement first. After that there should be a notice period during which the lawyers will attempt to reach out and tell you what you need to do to receive your money. (Not a lawyer, not legal advice).

You can follow the case here: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/bartz-v-anthro...

You can see the motion for settlement (what the news article is about) here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

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nextworddev 7 days ago | parent [-]

Thank you very much. There seems to be a lot of friction in this seemingly simple process…

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gpm 7 days ago | parent [-]

For what it's worth the friction exists for a reason, conflicts of interest.

The lawyers suing Anthropic here will probably walk away with several hundred million dollars - they have won the lottery.

If they managed to extract twice as much money from Anthropic for the class, they'd walk away with probably twice as much... but winning the lottery twice isn't actually much better than winning the lottery once. Meanwhile $4500 is a lot more than $2250 (the latter is a reasonable estimate of how much you'll get per work after the lawyers cut). Which risks the lawyers settling for less than is in their clients best interests so that they can reliably get rich.

Personally (not a lawyer or anything) I think this settlement seems very fair, and I expect the court will approve it. But there's definitely been plenty of class actions in the past where lawyers really did screw over the class and (try to) settle for less than they should have to avoid risking going to trial.

	▲	nextworddev 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting. Maybe there should be an easier way to file class action lawsuits and collect it - in a cheaper and more efficient manner