Scribe Media has resumed at least some operations, and has reactivated some of their social media promotions and campaigns, after massive layoffs earlier this year. Though the company was looking for a buyer — and a small investment firm signed a letter of intent to acquire Scribe’s assets if they could get financing –there is no sign of that happening. According to a post in mid-July, prospective buyer Enduring Ventures had concluded during due diligence, like many others, “that the situation was a lot worse than our initial understanding.” Instead, they have “a consulting agreement…which allows us to work on […]
Legal
Appeals Court Strikes Down “Mandatory Deposit” of Books with the Library of Congress
Yesterday the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of small Virginia publisher Valancourt Books, finding that publishers should not be required to send physical copies of their copyrighted books to the Library of Congress. The process of a “mandatory deposit” of books to the LOC (Section 407 of the Copyright Act), without compensation from the government, was unconstitutional, the court said, reversing a lower court decision. Previously, the LOC claimed that the providing the books to the Library of Congress was related to copyright protection, and refusal to do so would result in […]
AAP, Others File Brief Against TX Book Ban Law
Plaintiffs including the AAP and bookstores Book People and Blue Willow have field a brief opposing Texas’s motion to dismiss their lawsuit against the state’s book ban law, which would require retailers to place ratings on books. The next hearing is scheduled for Monday, and the judge is expected to make a ruling before the law would go into effect on September 1. In their filing, the plaintiffs write, “Plaintiffs have suffered an injury-in-fact that is traceable to Defendants and that will be redressed by injunctive relief. Plaintiffs’ injuries are “imminent” because they will be barred from selling any books […]
Your Books Trained Those Large Language Models
As is already being contested in a number of lawsuits seeking class action status, the core datasets on which all of the major large language models have been trained rely on stolen, copyrighted books. As a new Atlantic magazine article by Alex Reisner puts it, “Pirated books are being used as inputs for computer programs that are changing how we read, learn, and communicate. The future promised by AI is written with stolen words.” BookCorpus was stolen from Smashwords authors. Books3 is a body of between 150,000 and 190,000 books from established publishers and authors. The Atlantic piece extracts the […]
Judge Approves Internet Archive Permanent Injunction, Limits It to Works That Have eBook Editions
On Monday US District Court John Koeltl quickly approved the proposed permanent injunction filed last Friday by the litigating AAP publishers and the Internet Archive, following his finding that the IA had infringed authors’ copyrights. That action means the imposition of the injunction — and the bringing down of illegal ebooks — will commence shortly. But the judge did agree with the Internet Archive to limit the injunction so as to apply only to books for which the publisher has a commercially-available ebook edition. His reasoning, as the IA had argued, was that the 127 named works in the case […]
Another Day Another Suit: Music Companies Sue Internet Archive Over Their Infringement
The NYT ran a disappointingly naive and ill-founded article on the Internet Archive’s clear, unequivocal, comprehensive loss in court for copyright infringement of published books on a “mass” scale. They fall head over heels for Brewster Kahle as performer of a “good deed” based on a simple “notion” of helping when he conferred to himself the power to violate copyright laws from around the world and break even his own fake lending rules when he gave away millions of ebooks “mostly unavailable elsewhere” (also proven false) without limits during the pandemic. Fortunately, there is a fact-based record with the court, […]