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 […]
Legal
Judge Rules Against “Fair Use” Defense in First AI Copyright Case
Thompson Reuters won its case against tech company Ross Intelligence, which copied TR’s Westlaw legal content to create its own AI, Reuters reports. This is the first judgement in an AI copyright infringement case in the US. Specifically, the judge ruled that Ross’s use of Westlaw’s content did not constitute “fair use”–a defense being used by several AI companies in suits about their use of pirated books. “We are pleased that the court granted summary judgment in our favor and concluded that Westlaw’s editorial content, created and maintained by our attorney editors, is protected by copyright and cannot be used […]
Meta Documents Suggest Licensing Books Would Preclude Them From Pirating Them
According to newly unsealed filing in the case of several authors against Meta for copyright infringement, plaintiffs note that Meta’s documents show that the tech company knowingly used pirated material to train their AI tool Llama, even after employees raised flags that it was unethical and looked into paying for licenses. According to the filing, in one document, a Meta employee stated that she’d “been helping with buying content” from a redacted textbook publisher. Other internal messages “openly discuss licensing efforts and weigh the tradeoffs of using pirated textbooks and other copyrighted works from LibGen instead, including a statement that […]
Six Publishers and Authors Guild Sue Over Idaho Book Ban Law
Six publishers—Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks—have filed suit challenging a book banning law in Idaho that went into effect on July 1, 2024. The publishers are joined as plaintiffs by Authors Guild; authors Malinda Lo, David Levithan, and Dashka Slater; the Donnelly Public Library District; a teacher; two students; and two parents. The law, HB 710, affects both public and school libraries. Like other book banning laws, it prevents minors of any age from accessing any books with “sexual content,” with a definition of the term that’s “exceptionally broad, vague, […]
Grand Jury Indicts Three People Behind $44 Million PageTurner Scam
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 […]
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 […]