Legal Issues

If you need to request permissions from an author or publisher, here are general guidelines, plus a sample letter you can customize.

Asking an editor or agent to sign a non-disclosure agreement is not part of traditional publishing business practice.

I recently received the following question from working writer Shannon Traphagen: I have been fervently working on my novel (I

Given that the administration has ignored other judicial orders, it’s unclear whether the government will pay out the money owed under the grants.

That breaks down to 119,876 claims that account for 440,490 of the 482,460 works on the official list.

US copyright law allows for the prevailing party to recover legal fees, although it’s discretionary and not automatic.

The objection argues that the settlement, while fair in amount, would funnel most of the money away from authors and toward publishers.

Attorneys’ fees have dropped from $300 million (20% of the award) to $187.5 million (12.5% of the award), leaving more for authors.

Dave Hansen, the executive director of the Authors Alliance and an expert on issues of copyright and fair use, offers clarity on the case.

To reach this conclusion, the judge read six drafts of the plaintiff’s work and the four Crave novels, and found no more than common tropes.

A heads up to author-publishers, small publishers, or even sizable publishers that may not realize they have unclaimed books in the database.

In addition to pirating ebooks, they bought print books from wholesalers and used book retailers, including Ingram and Baker & Taylor.

Hachette Book Group and Cengage are joining a 2023 lawsuit against Google for using books to train its AI model known as Gemini.

The lawsuits accuse Perplexity of retrieving information in real time from paywalled sites without licensing.

In one case, the judge has ordered OpenAI to provide in-house communications about deleting datasets they used to train ChatGPT.

This is a PSA for any Amazon Publishing authors whose books are in the Anthropic settlement list.

Getty Image’s lawsuit against Stable AI, for scraping millions of images to train its software, has failed in a narrow ruling.

The Arizona law firm has no connection to the Anthropic case, but is trying to skim off authors in the class who may be unhappy about the current settlement.

The suit, consolidated with several other cases from a range of authors, alleges that ChatGPT’s outputs constitute copyright infringement.

The Authors Guild is holding a free webinar for all authors (you don’t have to be a member) on Thursday, October 16, at 6 p.m. ET.

Beginning October 2, authors can check an online searchable list to see if their works are included in the Anthropic settlement.

The proposed split is common in publishing contracts for sharing the proceeds in copyright infringement cases.

Some authors are finding their publishers did not in fact register their books as they are contractually obligated to do.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys are now collecting contact information from all authors and publishers who may be part of the class.

A federal judge said that the law’s prohibition on books describing sexual conduct was overbroad and violates the First Amendment.