The Authors Guild has officially launched its Human Authored certification program. The program, which was launched in beta for members in 2025, is now open to the public. Authors can register to use the Human Authored certification mark to distinguish their human-written books from AI-generated books. Certification costs $10 per book for non-Guild members and is free to members. Next week, the Guild will open the program up to U.S. publishers to purchase certifications in bulk. “The overwhelming response from authors has validated our belief that transparency in authorship is not just desired—it’s essential,” said Rasenberger. “By opening this program to all authors nationwide, we’re empowering […]
AI
CCC Launches New AI Licensing Options; Pan Macmillan to Train Employees in AI
The Copyright Clearance Center will launch collective and pay-per-use licensing options, focused on higher ed customers, in addition to the two non-exclusive licensing options it already offers. In the CCC’s Annual Copyright License for Higher Education, college and university users can license “internal-only AI re-use rights for text-based works from participating rightsholders,” to be used for tools including prompts, summaries, and chatbots. AI Transactional Rights will allow licensing for “specific AI use cases, beginning with content summarization.” “CCC is pro-copyright and pro-AI,” CCC president and ceo Tracey Armstrong said in a release. “AI outcomes are strengthened by reliance on responsibly sourced […]
Bipartisan CLEAR Act Would Require Transparency of AI Training Material
Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and John Curtis (R-UT) have introduced a bill that would require tech companies to submit a list of the copyrighted works used to create AI products to the register of copyrights. The Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting Act or ‘‘CLEAR Act” would require companies to submit “a sufficiently detailed summary of each copyrighted work in the training dataset” 30 or more days before a generative AI product is released. The bill would also be retroactive to any products available before the bill is enacted. If a company violates the act, they would be subject to a […]
New Lawsuit Over AI Training Targets Adobe
Adobe has been sued in a proposed class action suit over using books to train its AI software. The lead plaintiff in the case is Art Kleiner, author of the 1996 book The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change, which was included in the Books3 dataset. Books3 is part of the SlimPajama dataset, which Adobe used to train its “SlimLM small language models,” which provides “document assistance tasks on mobile devices,” according to the complaint. “This runs contrary to Adobe’s outspoken stance on ethical AI development and use” for its AI image generator, Firefly, the […]
Google Wishes Publishers Would “File Their Own Case” Instead of Joining Writers’
In a new filing, Google opposes Hachette and Cengage’s motion to join a class action of writers against the tech giant. Google argues that the publishers’ intervention is “untimely” since they could have joined the “widely reported suit” any time after it began in July 2023, including when Google subpoenaed Hachette in March 2025. Allowing the publishers to intervene in the case “would massively disrupt the proceedings and prejudice Google,” the company says. “If book publishers Cengage and Hachette…want to present ‘their own evidence and arguments’ about how Google supposedly infringed their copyrights, …they can file their own case,” the […]
Newly Released Documents Shed Light on Anthropic’s Plan to Scan Every Book
A set of unredacted and less-redacted documents from the Anthropic case have been released, revealing more details on the tech company’s secret plan to copy every book in existence to teach their AI tool “how to write well.” “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” Anthropic said in the filings, as reported by the Washington Post. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” In Project Panama, Anthropic estimated that there are approximately 130 million unique books in the world, including 40 million that are able to be […]