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 […]
Legal
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, […]
Proposed Internet Archive Judgment Would Bring Down Infringing Files Right Away
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 […]
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 […]