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 […]
AI
Meta Knew About Legal Issues With AI Training, Authors’ Suit Claims
In an update to their AI copyright infringement case against Meta, plaintiffs Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden allege that, as early as 2020, lawyers for Meta knew there were “legal problems” with using copyrighted books within the dataset to train their AI tool Llama. Kadrey, et al. are now joined by authors Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Díaz, Andrew Sean Greer, David Henry Hwang, Matthew Klam, Laura Lippman, Rachel Louise Snyder, Ayelet Waldman, and Jacqueline Woodson in the class action suit. Llama uses The Pile, a dataset for training large language models that contains Books3, a corpus of […]
AAP Counters Big Tech Arguments on AI
Final “reply comments” on the US Copyright Office’s “study of the copyright law and policy issues raised by artificial intelligence systems” are due by the end of day Wednesday. While the office itself has not yet posted any of the replies, the AAP has provided a copy of their comments to the media. The organization states its “forceful opposition to the flawed and inaccurate assertions submitted by some tech companies and/or their investors in the first comment round, in which they position copyright and the protection of creative expression as an obstacle to innovation and progress. This is nonsense. Copyright […]
Pan Macmillan Appoints Global AI Head
At Pan Macmillan, Sara Lloyd has been appointed to the new position of group communications director and global AI lead. Communications and publicity directors of Pan Macmillan’s imprints will report to her, and she will coordinate on AI strategy with all of the company’s English-speaking divisions worldwide. Llyod “will chair a newly established global trade AI steering group, coordinating the group’s approach to AI safety and ethics, and will develop cross-group principles and policies in line with AI developments,” the Bookseller reports. Lloyd said, “As part of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the impetus to lean into new technologies, innovate and […]
Author Sues OpenAI and Microsoft on Behalf of Nonfiction Writers
Julian Sancton, author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night, has filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft on behalf of other nonfiction authors, citing copyright infringement in training ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and other generative AI tools. Unlike other similar suits, this one focuses on the work of nonfiction authors, and is the first to name Microsoft as a defendant. Like other suits, this one asserts that the tech companies are making a profit—the complaint quotes an OpenAI report that it is making $1.3 billion per year—from the use of copyrighted works, without […]
Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud On Generative AI
As we have noted recently, the various AI companies (and their backers) have dutifully filed comments with the US Copyright Office explaining why they believe training their systems on copyrighted work is fair use and “just math.” So it’s notable that vice president of audio at Stability AI Ed Newton-Rex left the company recently and made clear at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit he believes those arguments are wrong. (He oversaw their music creation product, Stability Audio.) He resigned “because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’.” As he […]