The AAP, Hachette, Wiley, PRH, and Harper Collins filed a brief with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals opposing the Internet Archive’s appeal of the copyright lawsuit they lost last year. District Court Judge John Koeltl’s verdict granting summary judgment just under a year ago was clear, overwhelming, and rooted in Second Circuit precedent. So the plaintiffs’ arguments are largely the same as the those that won them the case. Despite the IA’s assertion that they were doing it for the common good, their copying and distribution of in-copyright books — under the invented legal theory of controlled digital lending […]
Legal
NYT Responds to OpenAI’s “Hacking” Claims
The New York Times responded to OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the paper’s copyright lawsuit, which claimed that the Times “hacked” Chat-GPT in queries to get responses that support their case. According to the Times’ response, OpenAI’s claim is “as irrelevant as it is false.” “OpenAI’s true grievance is not about how The Times conducted its investigation, but instead what that investigation exposed: that Defendants built their products by copying The Times’s content on an unprecedented scale—a fact that OpenAI does not, and cannot, dispute,” lawyers for the paper state in their filing. That OpenAI used the Times’s copyrighted material to […]
Author David Goggins Sues Amazon Over Counterfeit Copies
Author and former Navy Seal David Goggins is suing Amazon for selling counterfeit copies of his 2018 self-published book Can’t Hurt Me on its third party marketplace. In a suit filed on February 23 in the US District Court for the Western District of Seattle, Goggins alleges that the retailer knowingly sold bootleg copies of the book, as well as summaries that included Goggins’ images, and other products based on the book, despite Goggins’ repeated efforts to get the materials removed. According to the suit, Can’t Hurt Me has sold seven million copies to date. (Circana Bookscan has recorded US […]
Judge Dismisses Parts of Author Suits Against OpenAI
Ninth Circuit District Court Judge Aracelli Martinez-Olguin in California dismissed four of the more technical counts brought by authors against OpenAI in multiple lawsuits. The decision follows other rulings in being skeptical that the output of generative AI—even if it is significantly similar to an original work—is a violation of the creator’s copyright. Notably, however, the foundational claim—that training OpenAI on a massive corpus of copyrighted works without permission violates copyright—was not challenged at this stage, and will proceed. Also notable is that Judge Martinez-Olguin did allow another important claim of the plaintiffs to go forward, which is the allegation […]
NYPL Tries New “Orphan” Works Workaround
The New York Public Library has developed a novel, permission-based approach to try to bring potentially in-copyright “orphan works” of scholarship back into general availability. The problem, as they have identified through a variety of efforts, is that often neither the author not the publisher is certain whose permission is needed to digitize and make available out-of-print or otherwise commercially dormant books that may still be covered by copyright. And the expense — and potential liability — of doing the research or granting permission without certainty about the rights makes the risks outweigh the potential benefits of agreeing to republication. […]
Tattered Cover Files Reorganization Plan, with Higher Debts Than Originally Declared
Following their first filing for voluntary bankruptcy in mid-October, the owners of Tattered Cover filed a reorganization plan with the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Colorado earlier this week. While the store group initially said it lost about $660,000 during the year last year and owed at least $1.375 million to publishers and Colorado’s Office of the State Auditor for abandoned gift cards, the new documents depict a more severe situation. As of the initial filing in October, they had secured debt of approximately $820,000, and unsecured claims of just over $3.2 million. In the previous year, 2022, […]