The Department of Justice took the highly unusual step of filing a “statement of interest” in support of OpenAI and Microsoft in the copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the New York Times. (Though they also declare in a footnote, “The United States’ legal arguments apply similarly to all parties in this litigation and the related cases, including book authors and publishers.”) It’s a policy position presented in the language of a legal paper. Their official position, flowing from Dear Leader’s executive order on “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” is that the development of LLMs is super-duper transformative, […]
Government
Register of Copyrights Can Keep Job While Suit Continues, SCOTUS Says
On Tuesday, The Supreme Court denied the Trump Administration’s request to stay former Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter’s return to her job while her lawsuit challenging her firing is pending. In a brief unsigned order, the Court writes, “The application for stay is denied. The denial of the application is not a ruling on the merits of the legal issues presented in the litigation.” The Supreme Court previously held that Perlmutter could remain in her position pending final judgment on the legality of the president’s removal of staff at the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. […]
Supreme Court Justices Earn $2M From Books in 2025
According to annual financial disclosure forms, book publishers paid four Supreme Court justices more than $2.4 million in 2025. Ketanji Brown Jackson received more than $1.18 million from Penguin Random House for a “book advance.” Random House published her memoir Lovely One in September 2024, and issued a YA adaptation in January. She has been paid over $4.14 million in total by PRH. Penguin Random House paid Sonia Sotomayor $88,000 in royalties for Turning Pages and Just Ask! after her agent’s commission. In addition, she writes that “Penguin Random House has advised me that it spent $7473 to support the […]
Bolton to Plead Guilty to Mishandling Sensitive Information in Notes for Book
Former national security advisor to President Donald Trump from 2018-2019 John Bolton will plead guilty to improper handling of classified information related to his memoir, The Room Where it Happened. Bolton was accused of using personal email and a messaging app to send “more than 1,000 pages of notes, which included national defense information” to his wife and daughter, the NYT reports. His email was later hacked by “a cyber actor believed to be associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” according to the indictment. Previously, the first Trump administration sued Bolton unsuccessfully to block the publication of the 2020 […]
Judge Rules Termination of NEH Grants Was Unconstitutional
In a lengthy, detailed and often incredulous 143-page opinion, District Court Judge Colleen McMahon found in summary judgement that the mass termination of over 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants in April 2025 by DOGE “was unlawful because it was undertaken in violation of the First Amendment, in violation of the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment, and without statutory authority.” Additionally, “DOGE officials lacked statutory authority to identify, select, or direct the termination of NEH grants” and “the resulting terminations were ultra vires [Latin for beyond the powers].” The two cases were brought by the Authors Guild […]
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 […]