On Friday the AAP and Internet Archive jointly filed with US District Court Judge John Koeltl the long-awaited proposed consent judgment and permanent injunction, following the judge’s forceful and unequivocal ruling from March finding the IA guilty of “wholesale copying and unauthorized lending” on a “mass” scale. Most importantly for the near term, they ask to the court to enter a permanent injunction that “is effective immediately and shall not be stayed pending [any] appeal” that means the illegal distribution of the named plaintiffs’ full catalogs of in-copyright books will stop right away (within 14 days of providing notice). Because […]
Legal
Vivendi Investigated For Allegations of Premature Involvement with Lagardere
Following media reports alleging that Vivendi violated EU rules by violating its “standstill” agreement and engaging in Lagardere’s business affairs prior to the closing of the merger, the European Commission “has decided to open a formal investigation.” They note that, “An opening of a formal investigation does not prejudge its outcome.” But, as EC antitrust head Margrethe Vestager states in the release, “At this stage, the Commission has gathered sufficient elements to open a formal investigation to determine whether Vivendi has complied with our procedures.” She notes: “Our ex-ante merger control regime, requires that companies notify transactions with an EU […]
Two Booksellers and An Industry Coalition Sue to Block Texas School Library Book Rating and Banning Law
Independent booksellers BookPeople in Austin, TX and Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston have joined with the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to sue the state of Texas over their pending new law severely restricting the availability of books in school libraries. The so-called Reader Act, aka The Book Ban in the plaintiffs’ legal papers, is due to go into effect September 1. Filing in suit in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division, the plaintiffs seek both preliminary and permanent injunctions blocking […]
Authors Sue Meta and OpenAI Over AI Training
Weeks after authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad filed suit against OpenAI, three more authors are suing the company for copyright infringement, also seeking class action status. Like Tremblay and Awad, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey filed a class action lawsuit in the Northern District of California on Friday, alleging that OpenAI used their books—Silverman’s BEDWETTER, Golden’s ARARAT, and Kadrey’s SANDMAN SLIM—to train ChatGPT without their permission. The lawsuit states, “Plaintiffs never authorized OpenAI to make copies of their books, make derivative works, publicly display copies (or derivative works) or distribute copies or derivative works. All those rights […]
Mississippi Law Banning Minors’ Access To Digital Materials Goes Into Effect
A new Mississippi law went into effect on July 1, restricting library access to digital materials for people under 18. As part of House Bill 1315, the state now requires permission from a parent or guardian for minors to use e-resources like Hoopla and Overdrive. BookRiot reports that even if parents grant permission, “minors may not have materials available to them, if vendors do not ensure every item within their offerings meets the new, wide-reaching definition of ‘obscenity’ per the state.” Because of the law’s onerous burden on screening a complete catalog of books in new and particular fashion, the initial […]
Authors Sue OpenAI for Copyright Infringement in Training ChatGPT, Seek Class Action Status
Following revelations that OpenAI’s ChatGPT — along with Google’s BERT and other foundational large language models — was trained on a corpus of over 7,000 books scraped from Smashwords without permission, along with another larger corpus of likely illegal written material — the first class action suit seeking to enforce authors’ rights was brought in a San Francisco Federal Court. Named plaintiffs and authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad seek class action status on behalf of a broad class of authors of copyrighted material, in a suit filed by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm and Matthew Butterick against OpenAI. They […]