Ninth Circuit District Court Judge Aracelli Martinez-Olguin in California dismissed four of the more technical counts brought by authors against OpenAI in multiple lawsuits. The decision follows other rulings in being skeptical that the output of generative AI—even if it is significantly similar to an original work—is a violation of the creator’s copyright. Notably, however, the foundational claim—that training OpenAI on a massive corpus of copyrighted works without permission violates copyright—was not challenged at this stage, and will proceed. Also notable is that Judge Martinez-Olguin did allow another important claim of the plaintiffs to go forward, which is the allegation […]
AI
Using AI to Search Deals and Dealmakers
We have launched an experimental use of an AI-powered search approach at PublishersMarketplace, called Matcher. Up until now, our corpus of over 200,000 deal reports has only been searchable through basic word matching and Boolean search strings—and our Dealmakers lists, while quite extensive, only cover the 100 or so sub-categories that we tag and track. Matcher is designed to help you find agents and editors that “match” your manuscript, using natural language descriptions of your work. In this initial phase, it comes in two versions: Deal Matcher lets you search through the deals database, and highlights the editors and agents involved […]
AAP Joins In New “Fairly Trained” Nonprofit
Fairly Trained is a newly-launched nonprofit that “certifies generative AI companies for training data practices that respect creators’ rights.” Their first certification — denoting licensed models — is awarded to “any generative AI model that doesn’t use any copyrighted work without a license.” to begin with, they have certified nine companies, most of which involve generative AI music. The venture is supported by a number of music industry groups — Universal Music Group, the Association of Independent Music Publishers, Concord, and Pro Sound Effects — but also the Association of American Publishers. And AAP ceo Maria Pallante is among the advisers […]
Two More Nonfiction Authors File Suit Against Microsoft’s AI
Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage have filed suit against Microsoft, the latest in a series of lawsuits claiming that training OpenAI on authors’ books is copyright infringement. Like other suits, the authors highlight that the company is making billions of dollars on its AI products without any compensation for the authors whose works built them. “Defendants clearly could have obtained the capital to pay given the extraordinary investments already made and the staggering valuations now associated with these LLMs,” the complaint reads. “Defendants also could have explored financing alternatives, such as profit sharing or other mechanisms to facilitate their development […]
New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft for Copyright Infringement
As we noted recently, coalitions of authors took the lead in 2023 in trying to hold the leaders in generative AI accountable for stealing vast amounts of copyrighted materials to train their Large Language Models. Now at year’s end, authors gained a powerful ally in court as the New York Times Company filed its own copyright infringement lawsuit in Federal Court in New York’s Southern District against OpenAI and Microsoft. The NYT says comes after lengthy negotiations: “For months, The Times has attempted to reach a negotiated agreement with Defendants, in accordance with its history of working productively with large […]
The Year In Legal News: Part 1
This year, publishing’s biggest legal battles centered on a few topics: AI, book banning, and the long-running suit filed by major publishers against the Internet Archive. Copyright was at the center of many of our stories–and will continue to be as lawsuits stretch into the new year. Due to the complexity of several ongoing cases, we’ve split our annual roundup into two parts, with the first focused on the Internet Archive suit and the many class action suits brought by authors and publishers against OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement. Internet Archive In March, a suit brought by the AAP […]