A federal grand jury indicted three people behind a publishing scam called PageTurner that defrauded elderly authors out of $44 million. The people arrested were Gemma Traya Austin of Chula Vista, CA, and Michael Cris Traya Sordilla and Bryan Navales Tarosa, both of the Philippines, who ran a company called Innocentrix Philippines. The indictment alleges that between September 2017 and December 2024 representatives for the company placed unsolicited phone calls to elderly authors, represented PageTurner as a book publishing business, claimed Hollywood executives were interested in adapting the authors’ work, and fraudulently convinced victims to send them money for various […]
Legal
Zuckerberg Approved Use of Pirated Books to Train AI, Suit Claims
Meta ceo Mark Zuckerberg himself knew that the books used to train the company’s AI tool were pirated, according to newly-public documents in one of the California class-action lawsuits against the tech company. Attorneys for a group of author plaintiffs (including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, Andrew Sean Greer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Jacqueline Woodson) assert that Zuckerberg approved the use of a dataset from shadow library LibGen to train their Llama LLM, despite concerns from other employees about it provenance. “Meta has treated the so-called ‘public availability’ of shadow datasets as a get out of jail free card, notwithstanding that internal […]
Arkansas’s Onerous Book Banning Law Declared Unconstitutional
Federal courts continue to push back on overzealous state book banning laws. Following a preliminary injunction 17 months ago stalling Arkansas’s book banning law, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found that two sections of the law are unconstitutional and in violation of the First Amendment, and issued a permanent injunction blocking those portions on Monday. He wrote: “If the General Assembly’s purpose in passing Section 1 was to protect younger minors from accessing inappropriate sexual content in libraries and bookstores, the law will only achieve that end at the expense of everyone else’s First Amendment rights. The law deputizes librarians […]
Defendants in Tracy Wolff Copyright Case Seek Motion of Reconsideration
The defendants in the Tracy Wolff plagiarism case, which include author Tracy Wolff; Emily Sylvan Kim at Prospect Agency; Entangled Publishing and their distributor Macmillan; and Universal City Studios, which optioned the book, have filed a Motion of Reconsideration with the court, still trying to avoid a trial and bring the case to a close. The parties are being sued in the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement by writer Lynne Freeman, who alleges that Wolff’s Crave series bears “overwhelming and undeniable” similarities to Freeman’s unpublished manuscript Blue Moon Rising. Recently, the court dismissed some of the claims […]
Trump’s Lawyer Urges Court to Jumpstart Audiobook Case
Donald Trump’s lawyer Robert Garson sent two letters to to Judge Gardephe in the Southern District of New York to try to expedite his case against S&S and Bob Woodward over THE TRUMP TAPES audiobook. In the first letter on November 20, Garson urged Gardephe to schedule oral arguments — even though, as we reported recently, the judge has yet to rule on a motion to dismiss from last year and thus discovery has been stayed. He wrote, “The Court is aware that President Trump is soon due to be inaugurated as the 47th President of these United States of […]
Florida Court Urges School District To Settle In Book Banning Case
A federal judge in Florida has urged the Escambia County School Board to settle a book-banning case brought by PEN, PRH, and others, mindful that it has cost local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. As of last September, the school board had already spent more than $440,000 on attorneys’ fees. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II wrote in the footnote of a court order that a settlement, “should be particularly important to (the school board) because it is spending taxpayer money to defend this suit and it could end up having to pay all or part of Plaintiffs’ attorney’s […]