Authors Alliance

The fairness hearing in Bartz v. Anthropic took place this afternoon, Thursday, May 14, 2026, before Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in the Northern District of California. The hearing addressed approval of the $1.5 billion class action settlement, Class Counsel’s fee request, and the objections and replies filed by class members and others. Read our observations below: https://lnkd.in/ekA5Qm3w

The fairness hearing in Bartz v. Anthropic is set for today, Thursday, May 14, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time before Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín. The hearing will be open to the public via Zoom. https://lnkd.in/ehUcFsUg

We are pleased to announce our collaboration with the eBook Study Group on a joint statement supporting Illinois HB5236, the Digital Library Protection Act, which passed the Illinois House without a single no vote and now heads to the Senate. The bill is a measured response to a major problem: Illinois libraries are spending large amounts of public dollars on ebook license contracts that undermine patron privacy, block ordinary library functions, and make it more difficult for libraries to buy and maintain a ebook collection of works from a broad range of authors. https://lnkd.in/e97qu8ef

Today in the Southern District of New York, Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill — joined by novelist Scott Turow and his company S.C.R.I.B.E., Inc. — filed a class action against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg over the use of copyrighted works to train Meta’s Llama models. The complaint has six counts: reproduction by torrenting, reproduction from web-scraped datasets, reproduction during training, distribution by torrenting, contributory infringement against Zuckerberg personally, and removal of copyright management information under DMCA §1202(b). Much of the underlying conduct alleged in the complaint is already being litigated in Kadrey v. Meta, where individual authors have raised overlapping claims about Meta’s training practices. What makes this new filing distinctive is not really the conduct it targets but the content it is focused on and the class it proposes. https://lnkd.in/eSmXC9Dx

AI litigation update, dystopia edition: Elsevier filed a class-action copyright suit against Meta today, claiming to represent anyone with a copyright interest in a book or article that Meta downloaded or used in AI training. For academic authors, this means Elsevier litigating on behalf of potentially millions of your articles, and if you retained rights, Elsevier is making the case that it can make these claims ON YOUR BEHALF. To give you a flavor of what they believe is covered, their lead journal article example is an NIH-funded "Cancer Genetics" article from 2012. The docket is here: https://lnkd.in/dTnXdh2U

We've submitted a comment to the US Copyright Office in response to its proposed fee schedule. We focus our comment on two things: (1) commending the Office for imposing heavier fee increases on corporate users—such as those registering large photographic and non-photographic databases, and (2) urging the Office to stay true to its stated policy goals of incentivizing creativity by not hiking up the price of recording termination notice.  https://lnkd.in/eeiC2u_A

In May 2024, we filed an amicus brief urging the Tenth Circuit to rehear Whyte Monkee Productions v. Netflix. The previous decision was disastrous for documentary filmmakers, historians, and anyone else who uses photographs, movie clips, or other works as historical reference points or for illustration. Thankfully, the court agreed to rehear the case. Yesterday, it issued a new opinion, and it completely reversed course. https://lnkd.in/e7iQUb4H

Today we are releasing the final report of the Public Interest Corpus project. The report is the product of more than a year of work supported by the Mellon Foundation, in which we asked how research libraries can make books data available for AI training and computational research in ways that serve the public interest, rather than reinforcing the existing concentration of access to texts among a small number of well-resourced commercial actors. We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for supporting this work, and to the many advisory board members, workshop participants, and interview subjects who shaped the report along the way. We are also grateful to Dan Cohen, Thomas Padilla, and Giulia Taurino, Ph.D. for their great work on this project. https://lnkd.in/ensgu2tk

Mixtapes raise several copyright questions. By definition, they contain multiple unauthorized reproductions and distributions, and arguably constitute unauthorized derivative works. Whether they are copyright infringements was a point of contention, but it was not an urgent question because the mixtape was made possible by the cassette recorder, which was an analog recording device. Everything changed in 1987, when Sony introduced the Digital Audio Tape, or DAT. The possibility now existed for consumers to spread thousands of perfect copies through the market, obviating the need for purchasing commercial copies. With DAT, the perceived threat of consumer recording went from negligible to existential. https://lnkd.in/eQhYDSEg

On April 8, Judge Martínez-Olguín issued an order to move the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement fairness hearing to May 14, 2026 at 2:00 p.m.  Class members who have timely objected and wish to be heard may join the hearing via the Zoom log-in information found on page 2 of the order.  https://lnkd.in/erSCs7_P