Bestelling author Fredrik Backman has signed with UTA for representation in all areas, after terminating his longtime representatives at the Salomonsson Agency earlier this year and waiting for a notice period to pass. UTA says they “will represent Backman across various divisions, expanding his publishing business alongside media rights, theater, podcasts and more.” Co-head of UTA Publishing Byrd Leavell said in their announcement, “We’re thrilled to welcome Fredrik Backman to the UTA family. His emotionally resonant and insightful work has made an impact on countless readers across generations, myself among them, and we’re looking forward to helping him reach even […]
Authors
Authors Sue Meta and OpenAI Over AI Training
Weeks after authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad filed suit against OpenAI, three more authors are suing the company for copyright infringement, also seeking class action status. Like Tremblay and Awad, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey filed a class action lawsuit in the Northern District of California on Friday, alleging that OpenAI used their books—Silverman’s BEDWETTER, Golden’s ARARAT, and Kadrey’s SANDMAN SLIM—to train ChatGPT without their permission. The lawsuit states, “Plaintiffs never authorized OpenAI to make copies of their books, make derivative works, publicly display copies (or derivative works) or distribute copies or derivative works. All those rights […]
Authors Sue OpenAI for Copyright Infringement in Training ChatGPT, Seek Class Action Status
Following revelations that OpenAI’s ChatGPT — along with Google’s BERT and other foundational large language models — was trained on a corpus of over 7,000 books scraped from Smashwords without permission, along with another larger corpus of likely illegal written material — the first class action suit seeking to enforce authors’ rights was brought in a San Francisco Federal Court. Named plaintiffs and authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad seek class action status on behalf of a broad class of authors of copyrighted material, in a suit filed by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm and Matthew Butterick against OpenAI. They […]
Authors Guild Adds AI Clauses To Model Contract
The Authors Guild has added four new recommended clauses to its model contract related to AI. The clauses require an author’s written consent “for their publisher to use AI-generated book translations, audiobook narration, or cover art.” Previously, they added a clause to prohibit the use of an author’s work for training AI without the author’s express permission. “The purpose of these demands is to prevent the use of AI to replace human creators,” writes the guild. “The Authors Guild strongly believes that human writing, narration, and translation are vastly superior to their AI mimics. Moreover, as an ethical matter, the […]
Wilbur Smith’s IP For Sale
The estate of global bestselling novelist Wilbur Smith, who wrote more than 50 books that sold 140 million copies worldwide, is selling all non-literary media rights (e.g. TV, film, theme parks, theatrical, gaming, and merchandise) to Smith’s IP. ACF Investment Bank, which handled the sale of rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, will broker the deal, and “they have already started contacting the logical international buyers and expect a strong response to this huge library of IP.”
Disruptions Leave A Number of Children’s Book Creators Looking for New Representation
Unrelated and varied circumstances at three different literary agencies last week left a number of children’s and young adult authors and illustrators looking for new representation, and became the focus of much discussion and concern on social media. The development with the biggest impact was at New Leaf Literary Agency, coming after the agency “parted ways amicably” with agent Jordan Hamessley, according to emails sent to clients. Update: After this story ran, Hamessley, who had not responded to our DMs, posted a lengthy statement on Twitter: “It was not my choice to leave, and I am heartbroken to learn that […]