In line with their initial proposal, lawyers for the author plaintiffs in the Anthropic copyright suit have formally requested that the court grant them $300 million in legal fees–20 percent of the $1.5 billion settlement. Class counsel argues in a filing that this amount is “reasonable,” since generally the benchmark for legal fees is 25 percent, then adjusted up or down by the court based in part on “the extent to which class counsel achieved exceptional results for the class.” The attorneys note that “the Settlement achieved here is not just exceptional—it is historic.” A significant question is whether Judge Alsup […]
Legal
OpenAI Must Share Communications, Testify on Pirated Datasets
OpenAI has been ordered to provide information about their deletion of pirated ebooks that may determine the outcome of one of the copyright infringement lawsuits against the company. In the class action lawsuit brought by authors against OpenAI in New York’s Southern District, Judge Ona Wang has directed the tech company to disclose all of their in-house communications regarding why they deleted the Books1 and Books2 datasets that they used to train ChatGPT. Previously, OpenAI said that they deleted the datasets, obtained from LibGen, due to “non-use.” The company then backtracked, saying that all reasons for deletion were protected under […]
Supreme Court Allows Perlmutter to Stay In Copyright Office, For Now
In an unsigned order on Wednesday, the Supreme Court allowed to stand for now a September ruling from the DC Court of Appeals reinstating Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter to her job. The high court will postpone any ruling on Perlmutter’s case until after they hear two similar cases already on the docket: The Trump administration’s moves to fire Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission and to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Oral arguments on the second case, Cook’s, are scheduled for January 21. While the order was brief and unsigned, you won’t be […]
Huckabee’s AI Copyright Suit Against Bloomberg Moves Forward
In the latest class action lawsuit over copyright infringement in AI training, a group of authors including Mike Huckabee, US Ambassador to Israel and former Arkansas governor, is suing Bloomberg in a class action suit. The plaintiffs, David Kinnaman, non-profit The Relevate Group (which holds copyright for one of Kinnaman’s books), Tsh Oxenreider, Lysa TerKeurst, and John Blase, as well as Huckabee, are authors of mainly Christian nonfiction books. They allege that the media company violated copyright when it used the Books3 database to train its finance LLM, BloombergGPT. “Using data from Books3 enabled Bloomberg to create its LLM faster […]
Federal Court Protects IMLS
On Friday, a Federal Court issued a permanent injunction halting the destruction of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The ruling by United States District Court chief judge John J. McConnell, Jr. immediately nullifies all actions that the Trump Administration took to dismantle the agency, and blocks them from being imposed in the future. Twenty-one states filed a lawsuit against the president for his efforts to eliminate the IMLS and as well as the Minority Business Development Agency, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. In March, an executive order withheld appropriated funds […]
OverDrive Sues OpenAI For Trademark Infringement Over Sora
OverDrive filed suit against OpenAI in a Northern Ohio Federal Court on Wednesday, alleging infringement of their trademark for the Sora brand, along with charges of unfair competition and deceptive trade practices. OverDrive’s Sora app for schools has been in use for over seven years, and was trademarked in 2022, while OpenAI’s Sora is their text-to-image creator first launched in December 2024. OverDrive writes in their complaint: “OpenAI’s recently launched AI text-to-video generation software app under the exact same name, Sora, using a confusingly similar icon, color palette, and visual identity, infringes OverDrive’s trademark rights and damages the integrity of […]