W.W. Norton filed suit last week against Follett Higher Education Group in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that Follett owes them over $8 million. The complaint asserts that Follett, which runs college bookstores and sells Norton books, has “failed to remit timely payment on both digital and print sales and currently is many months delinquent on its obligations,” this “despite mulitple demands for payment.” The full amount owed at time of filing was “at least” $8,337,126, with an estimated additional $914,000 due by April 30. The suit states that per the agreement between […]
Legal
Five Publishers Join Suit Against Iowa Book Ban Law
Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks, have joined Penguin Random House in the lawsuit against the state of Iowa challenging a new book banning law. PRH and a group of four authors–Malinda Lo, Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, and Jodi Picoult–first filed suit back in November. The law, which has been called “incredibly broad,” prohibits any books describing or depicting sex from appearing in public school or classroom libraries, regardless of context. The five publishers issued a joint statement: “We as publishers are uniting in our unwavering commitment to stand with educators, librarians, students, authors, and […]
Yes, Karp Was Surprised, Too
Regarding the reporting a week ago that Meta considered buying Simon & Schuster to strip mine the catalog for LLM training, the publisher’s ceo Jonathan Karp told a NYT podcast he was just as surprised by the news as you were: “It was really quite an experience for me. So Saturday morning I was eating my breakfast and reading the New York Times…eating my Grape-Nuts… And this was total news to me! I had no idea that this conversation was going on. The story was quoting private conversations that nobody knew about. This really was news to everybody. I’ve checked. […]
New York Lawsuits Against OpenAI Will Proceed
US District Judge Sidney Stein, in New York’s Southern District ruled that a host of New York-based copyright infringement lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft and others can proceed. Judge Stein rejected efforts by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, which represents multiple creator groups in California-based lawsuits, to block or consolidate the New York suits. Those suits include author actions led by the Authors Guild, and followed by other groups of authors, as well as the suit filed by the New York Times. The newspaper’s suit was initially thought to be one of the stronger sets of allegations. As Judge Stein noted, […]
AAP, Publishers Oppose IA’s Appeal
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 […]
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 […]