Agent and author Andrew Lownie is suing Simon & Schuster for breach of contract for declining to publish his biography of former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York. According to a complaint filed in the Southern District of New York, Gallery acquired the book in February for $250,000, paying a third of the advance. Lownie had already sold it to Harper Collins UK. VP, editorial director Aimee Bell wrote Lownie with editorial notes in April, copying his UK editor Arabella Pike, saying, “The material is all here—we just need to shape it a […]
Legal
SCOTUS Won’t Hear TX Library Case, Upholds Book Bans
The Supreme Court decided not to hear an appeal in the Texas book banning case Little v. Llano, upholding a Court of Appeals ruling that sides with the county and allows book removals. In 2021, Llano County officials removed 17 books about race and slavery, LGBTQIA+ identities, and “butt and fart books” from the public library. The bans were overturned and books were protected by two courts, which ruled that government officials could not remove books based on their content. But in May, a full en banc ruling by the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit Court of appeals reversed those decisions, […]
Lawyers in Anthropic Case Request $300M in Legal Fees
In line with their initial proposal, lawyers for the author plaintiffs in the Anthropic copyright suit have formally requested that the court grant them $300 million in legal fees–20 percent of the $1.5 billion settlement. Class counsel argues in a filing that this amount is “reasonable,” since generally the benchmark for legal fees is 25 percent, then adjusted up or down by the court based in part on “the extent to which class counsel achieved exceptional results for the class.” The attorneys note that “the Settlement achieved here is not just exceptional—it is historic.” A significant question is whether Judge Alsup […]
OpenAI Must Share Communications, Testify on Pirated Datasets
OpenAI has been ordered to provide information about their deletion of pirated ebooks that may determine the outcome of one of the copyright infringement lawsuits against the company. In the class action lawsuit brought by authors against OpenAI in New York’s Southern District, Judge Ona Wang has directed the tech company to disclose all of their in-house communications regarding why they deleted the Books1 and Books2 datasets that they used to train ChatGPT. Previously, OpenAI said that they deleted the datasets, obtained from LibGen, due to “non-use.” The company then backtracked, saying that all reasons for deletion were protected under […]
Supreme Court Allows Perlmutter to Stay In Copyright Office, For Now
In an unsigned order on Wednesday, the Supreme Court allowed to stand for now a September ruling from the DC Court of Appeals reinstating Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter to her job. The high court will postpone any ruling on Perlmutter’s case until after they hear two similar cases already on the docket: The Trump administration’s moves to fire Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission and to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Oral arguments on the second case, Cook’s, are scheduled for January 21. While the order was brief and unsigned, you won’t be […]
Huckabee’s AI Copyright Suit Against Bloomberg Moves Forward
In the latest class action lawsuit over copyright infringement in AI training, a group of authors including Mike Huckabee, US Ambassador to Israel and former Arkansas governor, is suing Bloomberg in a class action suit. The plaintiffs, David Kinnaman, non-profit The Relevate Group (which holds copyright for one of Kinnaman’s books), Tsh Oxenreider, Lysa TerKeurst, and John Blase, as well as Huckabee, are authors of mainly Christian nonfiction books. They allege that the media company violated copyright when it used the Books3 database to train its finance LLM, BloombergGPT. “Using data from Books3 enabled Bloomberg to create its LLM faster […]