L.J. Smith, Author of ‘Vampire Diaries’ Book Series, Dies at 66; The New York Times, March 26, 2025

 Jeré Longman, The New York Times; L.J. Smith, Author of ‘Vampire Diaries’ Book Series, Dies at 66

"L.J. Smith, an author of young adult novels best known for “The Vampire Diaries” series, which became a hit television drama, and for repossessing her characters by writing fan fiction after she was fired and replaced by a ghostwriter, died on March 8 in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 66...

Alloy Entertainment sought a young adult version of supernatural romance and signed Ms. Smith to write “The Vampire Diaries,” a series centered on a love triangle involving a popular high school girl named Elena Gilbert and a pair of vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon Salvatore.

The first three books, written for HarperCollins, were published in 1991, and a fourth was released in 1992. But Ms. Smith — whose first agent was her typist, who had never represented a client — told The Wall Street Journal that she had written the trilogy for an advance of only a few thousand dollars without realizing that it was work for hire, meaning she did not own the copyright or the characters...

By 2007, sales of “The Vampire Diaries” had increased, and Ms. Smith was contracted to continue the series by writing a new trilogy for Alloy Entertainment, for which she was entitled to half the royalties.

In 2009, “The Vampire Diaries” were adapted into a dramatic television series that lasted for eight seasons on the CW Network. Popular among younger audiences, the show used various musical genres to explore topics like romance and morality and helped popularize a grunge and leather-jacket fashion look."

Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright; The Guardian, March 25, 2025

Ella Creamer , The Guardian; Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright

"Richard Osman has said that writers will “have a good go” at taking on Meta after it emerged that the company used a notorious database believed to contain pirated books to train artificial intelligence.

“Copyright law is not complicated at all,” the author of The Thursday Murder Club series wrote in a statement on X on Sunday evening. “If you want to use an author’s work you need to ask for permission. If you use it without permission you’re breaking the law. It’s so simple.”

In January, it emerged that Mark Zuckerberg approved his company’s use of The Library Genesis dataset, a “shadow library” that originated in Russia and contains more than 7.5m books. In 2024 a New York federal court ordered LibGen’s anonymous operators to pay a group of publishers $30m (£24m) in damages for copyright infringement. Last week, the Atlantic republished a searchable database of the titles contained in LibGen. In response, authors and writers’ organisations have rallied against Meta’s use of copyrighted works."

Court filings show Meta paused efforts to license books for AI training; TechCrunch, February 14, 3025

Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch; Court filings show Meta paused efforts to license books for AI training

"According to one transcript, Sy Choudhury, who leads Meta’s AI partnership initiatives, said that Meta’s outreach to various publishers was met with “very slow uptake in engagement and interest.”

“I don’t recall the entire list, but I remember we had made a long list from initially scouring the Internet of top publishers, et cetera,” Choudhury said, per the transcript, “and we didn’t get contact and feedback from — from a lot of our cold call outreaches to try to establish contact.”

Choudhury added, “There were a few, like, that did, you know, engage, but not many.”

According to the court transcripts, Meta paused certain AI-related book licensing efforts in early April 2023 after encountering “timing” and other logistical setbacks. Choudhury said some publishers, in particular fiction book publishers, turned out to not in fact have the rights to the content that Meta was considering licensing, per a transcript.

“I’d like to point out that the — in the fiction category, we quickly learned from the business development team that most of the publishers we were talking to, they themselves were representing that they did not have, actually, the rights to license the data to us,” Choudhury said. “And so it would take a long time to engage with all their authors.”"

In AI copyright case, Zuckerberg turns to YouTube for his defense; TechCrunch, January 15, 2025

Kyle Wiggers

Maxwell Zeff

, TechCrunch ; In AI copyright case, Zuckerberg turns to YouTube for his defense

"Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have used YouTube’s battle to remove pirated content to defend his own company’s use of a data set containing copyrighted e-books, reveals newly released snippets of a deposition he gave late last year.

The deposition, which was part of a complaint submitted to the court by plaintiffs’ attorneys, is related to the AI copyright case Kadrey v. Meta. It’s one of many such cases winding through the U.S. court system that’s pitting AI companies against authors and other IP holders. For the most part, the defendants in these cases – AI companies – claim that training on copyrighted content is “fair use.” Many copyright holders disagree."

AI's assault on our intellectual property must be stopped; Financial Times, December 21, 2024

Kate Mosse, Financial Times; AI's assault on our intellectual property must be stopped

"Imagine my dismay, therefore, to discover that those 15 years of dreaming, researching, planning, writing, rewriting, editing, visiting libraries and archives, translating Occitan texts, hunting down original 13th-century documents, becoming an expert in Catharsis, apparently counts for nothing. Labyrinth is just one of several of my novels that have been scraped by Meta's large language model. This has been done without my consent, without remuneration, without even notification. This is theft...

AI companies present creators as being against change. We are  not. Every artist I know is already engaging with AI in one way or another. But a distinction needs to be made between AI that can be used in brilliant ways -- for example, medical diagnosis -- and the foundations of AI models, where companies are essentially stealing creatives' work for their own profit. We should not forget that the AI companies rely on creators to build their models. Without strong copyright law that ensures creators can earn a living, AI companies will lack the high-quality material that is essential for their future growth."

Internet Archive Copyright Case Ends Without Supreme Court Review; Publishers Weekly, December 5, 2024

 Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly; Internet Archive Copyright Case Ends Without Supreme Court Review

"After more than four years of litigation, a closely watched copyright case over the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending of library books is finally over after Internet Archive officials decided against exercising their last option, an appeal to the Supreme Court. The deadline to file an appeal was December 3.

With a consent judgment already entered to settle claims in the case, the official end of the litigation now triggers an undisclosed monetary payment to the plaintiff publishers, which, according to the Association of American Publishers, will “substantially” cover the publishers’ attorney fees and costs in the litigation."

Thousands of published studies may contain images with incorrect copyright licences; Chemistry World, October 28, 2024

DALMEET SINGH CHAWLA, Chemistry World ; Thousands of published studies may contain images with incorrect copyright licences

"More than 9000 studies published in open-access journals may contain figures published under the wrong copyright licence.

These open-access journals publish content under the CC-BY copyright licence, which means that anyone can copy, distribute or transmit that work including for commercial purposes as long as the original creator is credited. 

All the 9000+ studies contain figures created using the commercial scientific illustration service BioRender, which should technically mean that these are also available for free reuse. But that doesn’t appear to be the case.

When Simon Dürr, a computational enzymologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in Switzerland, reached out to BioRender to ask if two figures produced using BioRender by the authors of both studies were free to reuse, he was told that they weren’t. The company said it would approach both journals and ask them to issue corrections.

Dürr runs an open-source, free-to-use competitor to BioRender called BioIcons and wanted to host figures produced using BioRender that were published in open access journals because he thought they would be free to use. According to Dürr, he followed up with BioRender near the end of 2023, flagging a total of 9277 academic papers published under the CC-BY copyright licence but never heard back on their copyright status. In total, Dürr says he found 12,059 papers if one includes other copyright licences that restrict commercial use or have other similar conditions."

Why The New York Times' lawyers are inspecting OpenAI's code in a secretive room; Business Insider, October 10, 2024

Jacob Shamsian  , Business Insider; Why The New York Times' lawyers are inspecting OpenAI's code in a secretive room

"OpenAI is worth $157 billion largely because of the success of ChatGPT. But to build the chatbot, the company trained its models on vast quantities of text it didn't pay a penny for.

That text includes stories from The New York Times, articles from other publications, and an untold number of copyrighted books.

The examination of the code for ChatGPT, as well as for Microsoft's artificial intelligence models built using OpenAI's technology, is crucial for the copyright infringement lawsuits against the two companies.

Publishers and artists have filed about two dozen major copyright lawsuits against generative AI companies. They are out for blood, demanding a slice of the economic pie that made OpenAI the dominant player in the industry and which pushed Microsoft's valuation beyond $3 trillion. Judges deciding those cases may carve out the legal parameters for how large language models are trained in the US."

Authors Guild to offer “Human Authored” label on books to compete with AI; Marketplace.org, October 7, 2024

Matt Levin, Marketplace.org ; Authors Guild to offer “Human Authored” label on books to compete with AI

"The Authors Guild, the professional association representing published novelists and nonfiction writers, is set to offer to its 15,000 members a new certificate they can place directly on their book covers.

About the size of literary award stickers or celebrity book club endorsements adorning the cover art of the latest bestseller, the certificate is a simple, round logo with two boldfaced words inside: “Human Authored.”

As in, written by a human — and not artificial intelligence.

(Courtesy The Authors Guild)

“It isn’t just to prevent fraud and deception,” said Douglas Preston, a bestselling novelist and nonfiction writer and member of the Authors Guild Council. “It’s also a declaration of how important storytelling is to who we are as a species. And we’re not going to let machines elbow us aside and pretend to be telling us stories, when it’s just regurgitating literary vomitus.”

AI could be an existential threat to publishers – that’s why Mumsnet is fighting back; The Guardian, September 28, 2024

Justine Roberts , The Guardian; AI could be an existential threat to publishers – that’s why Mumsnet is fighting back

"After nearly 25 years as a founder of Mumsnet, I considered myself pretty unshockable when it came to the workings of big tech. But my jaw hit the floor last week when I read that Google was pushing to overhaul UK copyright law in a way that would allow it to freely mine other publishers’ content for commercial gain without compensation.

At Mumsnet, we’ve been on the sharp end of this practice, and have recently launched the first British legal action against the tech giant OpenAI. Earlier in the year, we became aware that it was scraping our content – presumably to train its large language model (LLM). Such scraping without permission is a breach of copyright laws and explicitly of our terms of use, so we approached OpenAI and suggested a licensing deal. After lengthy talks (and signing a non-disclosure agreement), it told us it wasn’t interested, saying it was after “less open” data sources...

If publishers wither and die because the AIs have hoovered up all their traffic, then who’s left to produce the content to feed the models? And let’s be honest – it’s not as if these tech giants can’t afford to properly compensate publishers. OpenAI is currently fundraising to the tune of $6.5bn, the single largest venture capital round of all time, valuing the enterprise at a cool $150bn. In fact, it has just been reported that the company is planning to change its structure and become a for-profit enterprise...

I’m not anti-AI. It plainly has the potential to advance human progress and improve our lives in myriad ways. We used it at Mumsnet to build MumsGPT, which uncovers and summarises what parents are thinking about – everything from beauty trends to supermarkets to politicians – and we licensed OpenAI’s API (application programming interface) to build it. Plus, we think there are some very good reasons why these AI models should ingest Mumsnet’s conversations to train their models. The 6bn-plus words on Mumsnet are a unique record of 24 years of female interaction about everything from global politics to relationships with in-laws. By contrast, most of the content on the web was written by and for men. AI models have misogyny baked in and we’d love to help counter their gender bias.

But Google’s proposal to change our laws would allow billion-dollar companies to waltz untrammelled over any notion of a fair value exchange in the name of rapid “development”. Everything that’s unique and brilliant about smaller publisher sites would be lost, and a handful of Silicon Valley giants would be left with even more control over the world’s content and commerce."

OpenAI Training Data to Be Inspected in Authors’ Copyright Cases; Hollywood Reporter, September 24, 2024

 Winston Cho, Hollywood Reporter; OpenAI Training Data to Be Inspected in Authors’ Copyright Cases

"For the first time, OpenAI will provide access to its training data for review of whether copyrighted works were used to power its technology.

In a Tuesday filing, authors suing the Sam Altman-led firm and OpenAI indicated that they came to terms on protocols for inspection of the information. They’ll seek details related to the incorporation of their works in training datasets, which could be a battleground in the case that may help establish guardrails for the creation of automated chatbots...

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria at a hearing on Friday questioned whether the attorneys can adequately represent the writers.

“It’s very clear to me from the papers, from the docket and from talking to the magistrate judge that you have brought this case and you have not done your job to advance it,” Chhabria said, according to Politico. “You and your team have barely been litigating the case. That’s obvious… This is not your typical proposed class action. This is an important case. It’s an important societal issue. It’s important for your clients.”

Internet Archive Court Loss Leaves Higher Ed in Gray Area; Inside Higher Ed, September 9, 2024

 Lauren Coffey, Inside Higher Ed; Internet Archive Court Loss Leaves Higher Ed in Gray Area

"Pandemic-era library programs that helped students access books online could be potentially threatened by an appeals court ruling last week. 

Libraries across the country, from Carnegie Mellon University to the University of California system, turned to what’s known as a digital or controlled lending program in 2020, which gave students a way to borrow books that weren’t otherwise available. Those programs are small in scale and largely experimental but part of a broader shift in modernizing the university library.

But the appeals court ruling could upend those programs...

Still, librarians at colleges and elsewhere, along with other experts, feared that the long-running legal fight between the Internet Archive and leading publishers could imperil the ability of libraries to own and preserve books, among other ramifications."

R.O. Kwon on writing in the age of A.I.; The Ink, September 8, 2024

The Ink; R.O. Kwon on writing in the age of A.I.

"What exactly are A.I.s doing when they churn out words? When they ghostwrite our notes and letters, summarize our news, and maybe take over the jobs of those writing the news in the first place — are they writing?

The novelist R.O. Kwon — author of two novels, The Incendiaries and Exhibit, both deeply concerned not just with language but with the way language is rooted in the very human experiences of faith and love and sex and being in a body — doesn’t think so. For Kwon, a writer is a person who writes — that is, a human in a body, who struggles with language. And, in her typically crystal-clear fashion, she made this point the other day in a series of posts."

OpenAI Pushes Prompt-Hacking Defense to Deflect Copyright Claims; Bloomberg Law, August 29, 2024

 Annelise Gilbert, Bloomberg Law; OpenAI Pushes Prompt-Hacking Defense to Deflect Copyright Claims

"Diverting attention to hacking claims or how many tries it took to obtain exemplary outputs, however, avoids addressing most publishers’ primary allegation: AI tools illegally trained on copyrighted works."

Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement; AP, August 19, 2024

MATT O’BRIEN, AP; Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement

"A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed “large-scale theft” in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books.

While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot.

The smaller San Francisco-based company — founded by ex-OpenAI leaders — has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact with people in a natural way...

The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction...

What links all the cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works. The legal challenges are coming not just from writers but visual artists, music labels and other creators who allege that generative AI profits have been built on misappropriation...

But the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses it of using a dataset called The Pile that included a trove of pirated books. It also disputes the idea that AI systems are learning the way humans do."

An academic publisher has struck an AI data deal with Microsoft – without their authors’ knowledge; The Conversation, July 23, 2024

Wellett Potter, Lecturer in Law, University of New England , The Conversation; ; An academic publisher has struck an AI data deal with Microsoft – without their authors’ knowledge

"In May, a multibillion-dollar UK-based multinational called Informa announced in a trading update that it had signed a deal with Microsoft involving “access to advanced learning content and data, and a partnership to explore AI expert applications”. Informa is the parent company of Taylor & Francis, which publishes a wide range of academic and technical books and journals, so the data in question may include the content of these books and journals.

According to reports published last week, the authors of the content do not appear to have been asked or even informed about the deal. What’s more, they say they had no opportunity to opt out of the deal, and will not see any money from it...

The types of agreements being reached between academic publishers and AI companies have sparked bigger-picture concerns for many academics. Do we want scholarly research to be reduced to content for AI knowledge mining? There are no clear answers about the ethics and morals of such practices."

AI copyright case; CTV News, July 13, 2024

CTV News ; AI copyright case

"The Federal Court of Canada will decide if artificial intelligence can be considered an author under copyright laws. Colton Praill reports."

Record labels sue AI music startups for copyright infringement; WBUR Here & Now, July 8, 2024

 WBUR Here & Now; Record labels sue AI music startups for copyright infringement

"Major record labels including Sony, Universal Music Group and Warner are suing two music startups that use artificial intelligence. The labels say Suno and Udio rely on mass copyright infringement, echoing similar complaints from authors, publishers and artists who argue that generative AI infringes on copyright.

Here & Now's Lisa Mullins discusses the cases with Ina Fried, chief technology correspondent for Axios."

How One Author Pushed the Limits of AI Copyright; Wired, April 17, 2024

 KATE KNIBBS, Wired; How One Author Pushed the Limits of AI Copyright

"The novel draws from Shupe’s eventful life, including her advocacy for more inclusive gender recognition. Its registration provides a glimpse of how the USCO is grappling with artificial intelligence, especially as more people incorporate AI tools into creative work. It is among the first creative works to receive a copyright for the arrangement of AI-generated text.

“We’re seeing the Copyright Office struggling with where to draw the line,” intellectual property lawyer Erica Van Loon, a partner at Nixon Peabody, says. Shupe’s case highlights some of the nuances of that struggle—because the approval of her registration comes with a significant caveat.

The USCO’s notice granting Shupe copyright registration of her book does not recognize her as author of the whole text as is conventional for written works. Instead she is considered the author of the “selection, coordination, and arrangement of text generated by artificial intelligence.” This means no one can copy the book without permission, but the actual sentences and paragraphs themselves are not copyrighted and could theoretically be rearranged and republished as a different book.

The agency backdated the copyright registration to October 10, the day that Shupe originally attempted to register her work. It declined to comment on this story. “The Copyright Office does not comment on specific copyright registrations or pending applications for registration,” Nora Scheland, an agency spokesperson says. President Biden’s executive order on AI last fall asked the US Patent and Trademark Office to make recommendations on copyright and AI to the White House in consultation with the Copyright Office, including on the “scope of protection for works produced using AI.”

Judge rejects most ChatGPT copyright claims from book authors; Ars Technica, February 13, 2024

 ASHLEY BELANGER, Ars Technica; Judge rejects most ChatGPT copyright claims from book authors

"A US district judge in California has largely sided with OpenAI, dismissing the majority of claims raised by authors alleging that large language models powering ChatGPT were illegally trained on pirated copies of their books without their permission."