The NYT’s well-drafted copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft has survived the defendants’ motions to dismiss and the primary claims will go to trial. Filed in the New York’s Southern District, the order was granted by Judge Sidney Stein, who did grant with prejudice a motion to dismiss unfair competition by misappropriation claims, while also striking other modest claims from various related lawsuits. Judge Stein’s brief order indicated he “will issue an Opinion setting forth the reasons for this ruling expeditiously,” with a schedule for proceedings to come thereafter.
Legal
Judge Blocks Iowa Book Ban Law, Again
U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher reinstated an injunction against Senate File 496, the Iowa state law that removes books with LGBTQ themes and references to sex acts from school libraries, after an Iowa Eighth Circuit panel reversed the original injunction in December 2023. Locher wrote that the law is unconstitutional, and “makes no attempt to evaluate a book’s literary, political, artistic, or scientific value before requiring the book’s removal from a school library and thus comes nowhere close to applying the ‘obscenity’ standard that is typically used to determine the constitutionality of statewide book restrictions. The result is the forced […]
Atlantic Allows You to Search Pirated Books on LibGen
The Atlantic has released a tool that allows people to search what books are included in the massive LibGen pirate database, based on metadata. According to court documents in the Kadrey v. Meta copyright infringement case, Meta used LibGen to train their GenAI tool Llama. LibGen includes approximately 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. You will see a lot of enraged social media posts from authors, as the tool helps personalize the comprehensive scale of the theft. As previously reported, Meta engaged briefly in conversations with publishers about licensing books, but decided not to because it was too […]
Neil Gaiman Asks District Court for a Dismissal
Neil Gaiman has asked the US District Court in Wisconsin to dismiss the civil lawsuit accusing him of rape and sexual assault filed by former employee Scarlett Pavlovich in February. Gaiman filed a motion to dismiss on March 4, writing in the filing that the case should be adjudicated in New Zealand. The filing states that “the Trafficking Victims Protection Act cannot be applied extraterritorially” and “international comity dictates that United States courts must abstain from adjudicating acts committed within the jurisdiction of a foreign nation.” The brief in support of the dismissal states, “Plaintiff’s claims are a sham. Her […]
Authors Guild Urges NEA Grantees and Applicants To Hold Tight; EOs Likely Unenforceable
Donald Trump’s January 20 and 21 executive orders to government agencies to terminate grants promoting DEI or “gender ideology” have sent NEA grant recipients and applicants—both organizations and individual authors—into confusion over the past few weeks. Making the landscape vaguer still is a preliminary injunction blocking those executive orders, in a case brought by higher education organizations and the city of Baltimore. Authors Guild president Mary Rasenberger advises that the NEA’s new rules and mandated “assurance of compliance” that new grant applicants are required to sign are likely unenforceable due to vagueness and unconstitutionality. In particular, new regulations have appeared […]
Meta Reached Out To Publishers To License Books But Gave Up
Newly released documents in the Kadrey v. Meta copyright infringement suit state that the tech giant reached out to publishers to license books for AI training, but ultimately “paused” that effort. In a deposition, director of business development, AI partnerships Sy Choudhury said that in early 2023 Meta looked into licensing “fiction book data, scientific textbook data, normal textbook data, images, videos” but the work to license “fiction books, nonfiction books, and coding” was stopped in April 2023. In another deposition, Alexander Boesenberg, who works in business development and AI partnerships, said, “We got to a point where we decided […]