Late last week Judge Alsup, presiding over the Bartz v. Anthropic copyright AI litigation, granted a motion to certify a class representing authors and rightsholders of nearly 7 million books. If you are a book author (or a publisher, or an heir to an author), you should be paying attention because there is a good chance that you could be included in this class.
In June, we published an FAQ for authors and librarians to give some guidance on how they might respond to NIH’s accelerated implementation of its public access plan, which requires immediate availability of sponsored research articles upon publication. Our FAQ from June is still good advice, but since then both the NIH and several publishers have updated their guidance and so we are giving some additional information about the latest here.
NO FAKES 2025 does not care about actual deception, impersonation, and harm to the average person; instead, it focuses on enabling political censorship and monetization of celebrity likeness.
The NIH Public Access Policy is in effect as of July 1, 2025. In response, Authors Alliance and SPARC have created a form to collect information about challenges or questions faced by authors, librarians and their institutions in complying with the roll out of new public access policies by federal grant making agencies in compliance with the OSTP directive to make federally funded research freely available to the public immediately upon publication.
In May 2025, Connecticut’s legislature passed landmark legislation to address restrictive ebook licensing practices that limit libraries’ ability to serve the public. It aims to ensure ebook licenses align more closely with libraries’ core public interest mission of lending, access, and preservation. This represents a pivotal step toward safeguarding the role of libraries in the digital age. As more states consider similar measures, a key question arises: Should authors support these efforts? The answer is unequivocally yes— and here’s why.
“Market dilution” suggests that “using copyrighted books to train an LLM might harm the market for those works because it enables the rapid generation of countless works that compete with the originals, even if those works aren’t themselves infringing.”
Yesterday, Judge Alsup released his decision on Anthropic’s motion for summary judgment in the fast-moving lawsuit it is defending, brought
Structured Asset doesn’t make music nor aim to enrich our cultural life; instead, it uses copyright enforcement as a weapon against artists like Ed Sheeran, and turns a system meant to protect creativity into a mere vehicle for chasing profit.
As the high‑profile copyright lawsuits against AI companies proceed, the courtroom drama captures headlines. But I’ve long thought that settlement may be the real outcome to watch.
We may already be entering “settlement watch” territory in one of the fastest-moving AI cases, Bartz v. Anthropic.
Back in October, I asked a simple but unresolved question: “Who represents you in the AI copyright suits?” Now, eight months later, we’re getting closer to an answer—at least for some authors. In Bartz v. Anthropic, one of the fastest-moving lawsuits over the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI systems, the plaintiffs have asked the court to certify a class of authors whose books were allegedly copied without permission.
