The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Utah on behalf of the estate of Kurt Vonnegut; authors Elana K. Arnold, Ellen Hopkins, and Amy Reed; and two anonymous Utah public high school students, over the state’s book banning law. Utah’s Sensitive Materials Law, passed in 2022 and amended in 2024, requires public schools and their libraries to remove certain “inappropriate” books or books with any reference to sex. These books include Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, among many other award-winning titles. The plaintiffs write in the complaint that the law […]
Legal
Meet the New Judge in the Anthropic Case
With the retirement of Judge William Alsup, Northern California District Court Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin will oversee the Anthropic copyright settlement from here. Appointed to the bench in 2023 by President Joe Biden, she is considered “one of the nation’s leading immigration attorneys, having spent her entire career advocating for rights of immigrant workers.” In paperwork filed December 30 as ordered by Judge Alsup, the plaintiffs’ attorneys admitted that they had agreed to the split of legal fees proposed to the court in an early December filing way back on August 7 in a written agreement. No doubt Judge Alsup would […]
Judge Alsup Doubles Down On Opposing Fees for Additional Law Firms In Anthropic Case
Northern California District Court Judge William Alsup had already made it clear during the course of the Anthropic settlement that he opposed efforts by plaintiff’s counsel to enlist the help of other law firms — as publishers’ coordination counsel and authors’ coordination counsel. In a hearing while the settlement was awaiting approval, the judge had declared, “There will be not one penny paid to any lawyer except class counsel.” Nonetheless, earlier in December, the lawyers asked the court for $300 million from the settlement fund in fees, and proposed that a quarter of that would go to the various additional […]
Amazon Has Constrained “Ask This Book,” Though Authors Guild Believes It’s An Infringing Derivative Use
The Authors Guild has been communicating concerns to Amazon that its “Ask this Book” in-book chatbot infringes authors’ reserved rights: “The Guild is concerned that Ask this Book turns books into searchable, interactive products akin to enhanced ebooks or annotated editions—a new format for which rights should be specifically negotiated—and, given Amazon’s stronghold on ebook retail, it could usurp the burgeoning licensing market for interactive AI-enabled ebooks and audiobooks.” Amazon’s view is that the feature is “a natural language expansion of the search functionality that already exists in Kindle apps and for which no license is required.” Though it’s not […]
Textbook and Academic Authors Association Alleges that Sage Publishing Misled Authors On Anthropic Settlement
The Textbook and Academic Authors Association asked permission to intervene in the Anthropic settlement case “to present concerns to the Court regarding the administration of the settlement process.” Based on emails sent to authors by academic publisher Sage Publishing, the association alleges that, “The mass email contained misleading communications—including instructions to authors as to how to fill out the claim submission form in a manner designed to benefit Sage at the authors’ expense.” The association hopes the court will “direct class counsel to issue a curative notice to Class member authors…directing them to disregard communications they might have received from […]
A New Group of Authors Sues Six AI Companies for Infringement
Author John Carreyrou, joined by five other authors, has opted out of the Anthropic settlement and is suing the company directly for copyright infringement — adding Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI and Perplexity as additional defendants (at least for now, until the companies move for separate actions). The allegation is that all of the plaintiff companies obtained pirated copies of the defendants’ books in order to train their large language models, and then further “made additional unlicensed copies of the unlawfully obtained books, including during ingestion, preprocessing, and model training and/or retrieval-augmented generation.” The authors — suing as individuals rather than […]