After winning their suit against Anna’s Archive in May, thirteen publishers are suing another pirate site, WeLib. “Plaintiffs bring this case to protect and enforce their copyrights and to stop Defendants’ intentional, widespread, and ongoing unlawful reproduction and distribution of literary works in the United States, to the detriment of Publishers, authors, and the public,” the filing reads. According to the complaint filed by Apress Media; Cengage; Elsevier; Hachette Book Group; Harper Collins; Wiley; Bedford, Freeman, & Worth; Macmillan Publishing Group; McGraw Hill; Pearson; Penguin Random House; Simon & Schuster; and Taylor & Francis, WeLib hosts 43 million books and […]
Legal
Amy Griffin Files Anti-SLAPP Motion Plus A Countersuit for Defamation Against Former Classmate Who Sued Her
Amy Griffin, author of the NYT-bestselling memoir The Tell, has filed an Anti-SLAPP motion to strike down the lawsuit brought against her in California Superior Court by a former classmate, and now has countersued her accuser for defamation in the US District Court of Nevada. In March, a plaintiff filing as “Jane Doe” sued Griffin for invasion of privacy, claiming negligence, infliction of emotional distress, and more, and stating Griffin used details of the plaintiff’s own sexual assaults in the book. The suit named the Griffin’s collaborator, Sam Lansky, as well as the book’s publisher and imprint, Penguin Random House and […]
Court Divides Authors’ Suit Against Six AI Companies
A group of authors cannot include six AI companies in one lawsuit for copyright infringement, a judge ordered. Plaintiffs John Carreyrou, Lisa Barretta, Philip Shishkin, Jane Adams, Matthew Sacks, and Michael Kochin, must sue Anthropic, Google, xAI, Perplexity, Apple, and NVIDIA as individual defendants—as those companies requested. Judge P. Casey Pitts in the Northern District of California severed the suit, noting that there was not enough commonality or evidence of a conspiracy between the tech companies to warrant joining them into one action. “Each defendant trained on a mixture of different data repositories at different times between 2020 and 2024,” 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 […]
Wolff Lawsuit Against Melania Trump Dismissed
A federal judge in New York dismissed author Michael Wolff’s pre-emptive lawsuit against Melania Trump, calling it “an abusively presented spat.” The main issue for the court is jurisdiction. Wolff sued Melania Trump last fall in New York State court, accusing the First Lady threatening to sue him for $1 billion in Florida to block publication of his book about her connection to Jeffrey Epstein. Wolff asked the New York court to decide that the accusations in Trump’s demand letter were not defamatory, and even if they were, they would be protected by anti-SLAPP laws. Trump had the case moved […]
Publishers Win Default Judgement Against Pirate Site
Publishers and the Association of American Publishers have won their suit against pirate website Anna’s Archive by default, as the defendant never responded to filings. The judge ordered Anna’s Archive to pay the maximum penalty—$150,000 for each of 10 works in suit owned by the 13 publisher plaintiffs, totaling $19.5 million—as well as destroy all copies of any of the publishers’ books and stop “otherwise infringing any Works.” Given that the site was entirely silent on the suit, it is unclear if they will comply with the ruling. Perhaps more importantly, the judge ordered all domain name registries and internet service […]