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, […]
Legal
Appeals Court Agrees that Texas READER Law Violates First Amendment
In a unanimous verdict, a three-judge panel on the Federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld District Court Judge Alan D. Albright’s clear and comprehensive ruling that Texas’s READER Act, a book banning law, is unconstitutional. The ruling and preliminary injunction blocking implementation of the law, which had been stayed pending the appeal, can now go forward, as the Appeals Court denied the state’s motion for stay pending further appeal. The case is a clear loser for Texas, and the Appeals Court barely breaks a sweat in rejecting all of the state’s fanciful arguments otherwise: “The question presented […]
Pen America and PRH’s Suit Against FL Schools Will Continue
Pen America and Penguin Random House’s lawsuit against the Escambia County, FL school board will move forward, U.S. District Judge Kent Wetherell ruled on Wednesday. The plaintiffs, which include a group of authors and parents, argue that the school system’s removal of more than 1,600 titles–including dictionaries and encyclopedias–is a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. “Today, we urged the court to vindicate the Constitutional rights of students, parents, authors and publishers,” Pen America, Florida director Katie Blankenship said in a statement. “We are heartened that Judge Wetherell agreed and that our case can proceed. These books need to […]
Two More Nonfiction Authors File Suit Against Microsoft’s AI
Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage have filed suit against Microsoft, the latest in a series of lawsuits claiming that training OpenAI on authors’ books is copyright infringement. Like other suits, the authors highlight that the company is making billions of dollars on its AI products without any compensation for the authors whose works built them. “Defendants clearly could have obtained the capital to pay given the extraordinary investments already made and the staggering valuations now associated with these LLMs,” the complaint reads. “Defendants also could have explored financing alternatives, such as profit sharing or other mechanisms to facilitate their development […]
Judge Blocks Iowa Book Ban Law
A federal judge filed a preliminary injunction against Iowa’s “incredibly broad” book banning law, which was set to take effect on January 1. The law would restrict from school and classroom libraries any book that describes or depicts sex, and any book about sexuality or gender identity (the latter half of the law was blocked on December 22). Penguin Random House and four authors filed suit to block the provision in November. In the filing, Judge Stephen Locher noted that the law “has resulted in the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries, including, among others, nonfiction history books, […]
New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft for Copyright Infringement
As we noted recently, coalitions of authors took the lead in 2023 in trying to hold the leaders in generative AI accountable for stealing vast amounts of copyrighted materials to train their Large Language Models. Now at year’s end, authors gained a powerful ally in court as the New York Times Company filed its own copyright infringement lawsuit in Federal Court in New York’s Southern District against OpenAI and Microsoft. The NYT says comes after lengthy negotiations: “For months, The Times has attempted to reach a negotiated agreement with Defendants, in accordance with its history of working productively with large […]