In the second half of our annual review of legal news, we recap the many lawsuits surrounding book banning and also touch on some other oddities that made their way to court this year. Book Banning For the second year in a row, book banning was a major concern. Strategies to combat the conservative-led bans against LGBTQ+ books and books by BIPOC authors in school libraries ranged from marketing campaigns to lawsuits. In May, PEN America, Penguin Random House, and a group of authors sued the Escambia County, FL school district where over 200 books had been targeted for banning, […]
Legal
The Year In Legal News: Part 1
This year, publishing’s biggest legal battles centered on a few topics: AI, book banning, and the long-running suit filed by major publishers against the Internet Archive. Copyright was at the center of many of our stories–and will continue to be as lawsuits stretch into the new year. Due to the complexity of several ongoing cases, we’ve split our annual roundup into two parts, with the first focused on the Internet Archive suit and the many class action suits brought by authors and publishers against OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement. Internet Archive In March, a suit brought by the AAP […]
On Appeal, Internet Archive Re-Ups Argument That Their Lending is Fair Use
The Internet Archive has filed a brief in their appeal of the US District Court’s ruling in favor of publishers, which found clear, unequivocal and overwhelming finding that the IA’s “controlled digital lending” amounted to “wholesale copying and unauthorized lending.” The basis of their argument to overturn Judge John Koeltl’s ruling is nothing more than that he misunderstood and was entirely wrong on his fair use analysis, which was was deeply rooted in Second Circuit precedent, including multiple cases already adjudicated by the Second Circuit of Appeals. They also maintain that CDL does not harm publishers. As always, the IA’s […]
Meta Knew About Legal Issues With AI Training, Authors’ Suit Claims
In an update to their AI copyright infringement case against Meta, plaintiffs Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden allege that, as early as 2020, lawyers for Meta knew there were “legal problems” with using copyrighted books within the dataset to train their AI tool Llama. Kadrey, et al. are now joined by authors Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Díaz, Andrew Sean Greer, David Henry Hwang, Matthew Klam, Laura Lippman, Rachel Louise Snyder, Ayelet Waldman, and Jacqueline Woodson in the class action suit. Llama uses The Pile, a dataset for training large language models that contains Books3, a corpus of […]
AAP Counters Big Tech Arguments on AI
Final “reply comments” on the US Copyright Office’s “study of the copyright law and policy issues raised by artificial intelligence systems” are due by the end of day Wednesday. While the office itself has not yet posted any of the replies, the AAP has provided a copy of their comments to the media. The organization states its “forceful opposition to the flawed and inaccurate assertions submitted by some tech companies and/or their investors in the first comment round, in which they position copyright and the protection of creative expression as an obstacle to innovation and progress. This is nonsense. Copyright […]
PRH Sues Iowa Over Statewide Book Ban Law
Penguin Random House and a group of four authors—Malinda Lo, Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, and Jodi Picoult—have filed a lawsuit against the state of Iowa over a recently-enacted law that prohibits any books describing or depicting sex from appearing in public school or classroom libraries. The law, SF 496, also restricts books that include themes of sexual orientation or gender identity from students through sixth grade. (Other plaintiffs include the Iowa State Education Association, one Iowa librarian, two teachers, and one high school student.) The suit claims the book ban provisions of the law violate the First and Fourteenth […]