Library reading app Libby is facing a backlash online over one element of its extensive AI policies, after clarifying on Bluesky on Monday that they do not exclude AI-generated content from their catalog. They wrote in a thread, “Libby’s role is to support choice by ensuring options are available and empowering libraries to serve their patrons. We don’t exclude titles created with AI tools from the catalog, we ask that publishers self-identify AI content.” The thread continues: “We recognize the environmental footprint of AI systems and we strive to minimize it through evaluation of our systems for sustainability.” OverDrive’s full […]
AI
Harlequin France Shifts to AI Translation
Harlequin France has begun to use AI translation in an effort to “increase profitability by reducing working time,” according to French translators association ATLF. In a letter to members, ATLF and the collective In the Flesh state that the publisher has contacted several translators to say that they will end their work with them after their current contract. Instead, the company Fluent Planet will translate books using AI and hire freelance editors to proof the translations afterward. According to Livres Hebdo, translators for Harlequin France’s Azur line of short romances were told in November that the books would begin machine […]
Meet the New Judge in the Anthropic Case
With the retirement of Judge William Alsup, Northern California District Court Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin will oversee the Anthropic copyright settlement from here. Appointed to the bench in 2023 by President Joe Biden, she is considered “one of the nation’s leading immigration attorneys, having spent her entire career advocating for rights of immigrant workers.” In paperwork filed December 30 as ordered by Judge Alsup, the plaintiffs’ attorneys admitted that they had agreed to the split of legal fees proposed to the court in an early December filing way back on August 7 in a written agreement. No doubt Judge Alsup would […]
Amazon Has Constrained “Ask This Book,” Though Authors Guild Believes It’s An Infringing Derivative Use
The Authors Guild has been communicating concerns to Amazon that its “Ask this Book” in-book chatbot infringes authors’ reserved rights: “The Guild is concerned that Ask this Book turns books into searchable, interactive products akin to enhanced ebooks or annotated editions—a new format for which rights should be specifically negotiated—and, given Amazon’s stronghold on ebook retail, it could usurp the burgeoning licensing market for interactive AI-enabled ebooks and audiobooks.” Amazon’s view is that the feature is “a natural language expansion of the search functionality that already exists in Kindle apps and for which no license is required.” Though it’s not […]
Textbook and Academic Authors Association Alleges that Sage Publishing Misled Authors On Anthropic Settlement
The Textbook and Academic Authors Association asked permission to intervene in the Anthropic settlement case “to present concerns to the Court regarding the administration of the settlement process.” Based on emails sent to authors by academic publisher Sage Publishing, the association alleges that, “The mass email contained misleading communications—including instructions to authors as to how to fill out the claim submission form in a manner designed to benefit Sage at the authors’ expense.” The association hopes the court will “direct class counsel to issue a curative notice to Class member authors…directing them to disregard communications they might have received from […]
A New Group of Authors Sues Six AI Companies for Infringement
Author John Carreyrou, joined by five other authors, has opted out of the Anthropic settlement and is suing the company directly for copyright infringement — adding Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI and Perplexity as additional defendants (at least for now, until the companies move for separate actions). The allegation is that all of the plaintiff companies obtained pirated copies of the defendants’ books in order to train their large language models, and then further “made additional unlicensed copies of the unlawfully obtained books, including during ingestion, preprocessing, and model training and/or retrieval-augmented generation.” The authors — suing as individuals rather than […]