By Michael Cader
By Michael Cader
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Texas formally issued a temporary administrative stay of Judge Alan D. Albright’s clear and unambiguous preliminary injunction blocking implementation of Texas’s cumbersome “READER” book banning law. The court is expected to decide further on whether or not to stay the original order pending the full appeal after the issue is fully briefed in early October.
By Michael Cader
By Michael Cader
Following three similar suits filed in San Francisco (and thus in California’s sometimes unpredictable Ninth Circuit), on Tuesday the Authors Guild and a roster of well-known authors filed suit in New York’s Southern District against OpenAI for the “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights in written works of fiction” in training their large language models. The Guild and named plaintiffs David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor Lavalle, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow and Rachel Vail […]
By Katy Hershberger
By Katy Hershberger
On Monday, Judge Alan D. Albright of the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division filed his full order blocking “READER,” a state book banning law that would require retailers to review and rate millions of books according to vague state standards for obscene content (ratings that the state could change anyway). The court ruled that the state could not delegate the rating of books to third parties, holding that it violates the First Amendment as “compelled speech.” In the preliminary injunction, the judge all but calls the Texas law dumb: “For whatever reason, Texas chose […]
By Michael Cader
By Michael Cader
Author plaintiffs Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman, David Henry Wang, Matthew Klam and Rachel Louise Snyder are the latest to file suit against OpenAI in Federal Court in California’s Northern District for San Francisco, seeking class action status “arising from OpenAI’s clear infringement of their intellectual property.” The suit is substantially similar to ones filed earlier this summer — first by named plaintiffs Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, and then by lead plaintiffs Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey. (The latter filed a separate suit against Meta for their AI training.) Both of the earlier suits were brought by the […]
By Michael Cader
By Michael Cader
Following US District Court Judge John Koeltl’s clear, unequivocal and overwhelming finding the Internet Archive guilty of “wholesale copying and unauthorized lending” of publishers’ books, the IA filed notice of appeal on the inauspicious day of Monday, September 11. Judge Koeltl’s ruling was deeply rooted in Second Circuit precedent, including multiple cases already adjudicated by the Second Circuit of Appeals, which has made crystal clear that there is no digital first sale doctrine. Internet Archive director of library services Chris Freeland admits in a posted statement, “We know this won’t be easy.” And he reasserts one of their core arguments […]
By Katy Hershberger
By Katy Hershberger
Though the Internet Archive was found guilty of copyright infringement and forced to remove books from its website, the injunction itself only applies to books published by the plaintiffs–Hachette, Harper Collins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House–and there is a provision designed to include any other AAP member publishers who wish to do so. The injunction also only covers titles that are available in ebook editions, leaving out some print books that may have been self-published, published by small presses, or had their rights reverted (or even books where big houses have rights only to the print editions). In a blog […]
