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 […]
AI
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 […]
Kindle’s New “Ask this Book” Uses Generative AI to Create An In-Book Chatbot — Without Permission or Rights
Authors have been fighting diligently to limit the encroachment of generative AI in courts and in contracts and now there is a new front in those battles as Amazon has quietly helped themselves to thousands of texts, with more planned soon. In October the company suggested, towards the bottom of a release focused on the refresh of their Kindle Scribe devices, they they would be “adding new AI-powered reading features that preserve the magic of reading on Kindle,” with “Story So Far” (a summary of what you had read so far) and “Ask this Book,” providing “spoiler-free answers to questions […]
Bloomsbury Contracts With Google to Use AI Services
Bloomsbury has entered an agreement with Google Cloud to use the tech company’s AI services, including NotebookLM, Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise. According to a release, “With an advanced AI infrastructure, Bloomsbury will benefit from data-driven and semantic search insights to improve trend analysis and drive book sales across Bloomsbury’s entire catalogue, while custom print prediction models can improve inventory management.” “Bloomsbury is pleased to be working with Google in this collaboration to demonstrate how cutting-edge technology can increase the discovery and sales of books, as well as transform engagement with content to improve learning outcomes,” ceo Nigel Newton said. […]
OpenAI Must Share Communications, Testify on Pirated Datasets
OpenAI has been ordered to provide information about their deletion of pirated ebooks that may determine the outcome of one of the copyright infringement lawsuits against the company. In the class action lawsuit brought by authors against OpenAI in New York’s Southern District, Judge Ona Wang has directed the tech company to disclose all of their in-house communications regarding why they deleted the Books1 and Books2 datasets that they used to train ChatGPT. Previously, OpenAI said that they deleted the datasets, obtained from LibGen, due to “non-use.” The company then backtracked, saying that all reasons for deletion were protected under […]