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

I’m glad to hear they did the right thing, albeit under pressure, I’m sure.

The accuracy and funding of research claiming Gen AI causes market harm have become important questions in the consolidated lawsuits.

The Guild says lack of clarity over rights reversion is the most common problem for claims due to lack of publisher records.

OpenAI, like Anthropic, created an internal library of books from the pirate website LibGen and even shared those works with outsiders.

Given the number of errors occurring in Anthropic claims, rights holders now have 60 days instead of 30 to submit information to support their claim.

I divide disagreements into three categories: basic disagreements, surprise agent claims, and even messier disagreements. Reasons for these disagreements vary, but metadata problems and communication from the settlement administrators have led to some of the confusion.

The government’s argument: AI development should not be restrained, whether training is fair use or not, in order to further US interests.

Due to ineligibility in the Anthropic settlement, some authors discovered publishers had failed to register their work for copyright.

Appeals have been filed by firms that were never appointed as class counsel but who nonetheless worked the case on behalf of authors and publishers.

The judge says Freeman’s case was brought in bad faith and awarding attorney fees might help deter other suits with “unreasonable claims.”

Google used access to digital copies of books via Google Books, the Google Play bookstore, and Google Scholar to train its Gemini model.

Meta argued that former employee violated a non-disparagement contract she signed after getting fired from Facebook in 2017.

The tech companies are accused of scraping the voices of actors from the internet and using them to train AI without the notice or consent.

The Authors Guild wants to hear from authors excluded from the Bartz v Anthropic settlement due to a publisher's failure to register for copyright.

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.