Latest news with #Bartz
Time of India
17-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
US authors suing Anthropic can band together in copyright class action, judge rules
US District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic may have illegally downloaded as many as 7 million books from the pirate websites, which could make it liable for billions of dollars in damages if the authors' case is successful. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads A California federal judge ruled on Thursday that three authors suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic for copyright infringement can represent writers nationwide whose books Anthropic allegedly pirated to train its AI District Judge William Alsup said the authors can bring a class action on behalf of all US writers whose works Anthropic allegedly downloaded from "pirate libraries" LibGen and PiLiMi to create a repository of millions of books in 2021 and said Anthropic may have illegally downloaded as many as 7 million books from the pirate websites, which could make it liable for billions of dollars in damages if the authors' case is for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision. An attorney for the authors declined to Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic last year, arguing that the Amazon- and Alphabet-backed startup used their books without permission or compensation to teach its chatbot Claude to respond to human case is one of several high-stakes lawsuits brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright owners against companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over their AI training AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content. Alsup determined in June that Anthropic's AI training made fair use of authors' works, but said the company still violated their rights by saving pirated copies of their books to a "central library of all the books in the world" that would not necessarily be used for AI said on Thursday the three authors could represent all writers whose books Anthropic allegedly downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi, rejecting Anthropic's argument that identifying all of the copyright-eligible works and their authors would be impractical.
Boston Globe
03-07-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
In lawsuit settlement, Smithfield, R.I. school district to unblock critic from social media accounts
Advertisement The organization had alleged the block violated Mayer's First Amendment rights 'to speak and to petition the government for redress of grievances.' Both accounts are used to announce school policies and operations; 'to share content produced for the town's schools; and to communicate with constituents,' the ALCU said. Get Rhode Map A weekday briefing from veteran Rhode Island reporters, focused on the things that matter most in the Ocean State. Enter Email Sign Up Under the The district will also pay for attorney's fees and court costs. Advertisement 'Blocking a constituent from expressing their opinions on the basis of their identity or viewpoint undermines their fundamental First Amendment right to speak and to petition the government for redress of grievances,' ACLU cooperating attorney David Cass said in a statement. 'Thankfully, with the assistance of counsel for the Smithfield School Committee, we were able to achieve a quick resolution to the constitutionally inappropriate social media limitations that had been imposed by the Smithfield School Department and Superintendent.' Bartz said in a statement on Thursday the district 'respects and values the right to free speech and remains committed to open communication with all members of our school community.' 'We recognize that social media is one avenue for public discourse, but we continue to believe that concerns are best addressed through the many in-person meetings and discussions we regularly offer to families and community members with any questions or concerns,' Bartz said. 'My focus remains on serving our students and ensuring our schools are safe, supportive, and welcoming environments for all.' Richard Iannitelli, chair of the Smithfield School Committee, said the committee 'respects our legal guidance and is moving forward in full compliance with the settlement.' Inannitelli also reaffirmed the committee's 'full support' for Bartz. 'While public officials must accept scrutiny, no one should be subjected to targeted or persistent negative online comments –particularly when there have been continued pathways for discussion and in-person engagement. We're focused on our leading priority – providing the best possible education for our students," Inannitelli said in a statement. In 2021, Advertisement Material from a previous Globe story was used in this report. Christopher Gavin can be reached at
Reuters
01-07-2025
- Reuters
Key Rulings on GenAI Training and Copyright Fair Use Practical Law The Journal
For a regularly updated case tracker covering intellectual property and privacy-related lawsuits concerning GenAI (including more decisions addressing fair use), see Generative AI: Federal Litigation Tracker on Practical Law. Bartz v. Anthropic PBC: N.D. Cal. On June 23, 2025, the US District Court for the Northern District of California held in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC that defendant Anthropic PBC's use of copyrighted books to train its GenAI tool was a fair use and granted summary judgment to Anthropic on this issue. The court also held that Anthropic's digital conversion of purchased print books to build its digital library was fair use but that its downloading of pirated copies for this purpose was not. (2025 WL 1741691 (N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025).) Anthropic PBC developed the GenAI tool Claude, which generates text responses based on prompts from users. In part to train the large language models (LLMs) underlying Claude, Anthropic assembled a central library of digitized books, including copies purchased in print form and then scanned into digital format, as well as copies downloaded from pirate websites. Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, Kirk Wallace Johnson, and their affiliated corporate entities (collectively referred to as the 'Authors') filed a putative class action lawsuit against Anthropic in August 2024, alleging copyright infringement for using copies of their books to build its digital library and train the LLMs. Anthropic moved for summary judgment on the issue of fair use. The district court analyzed the fair use factors under Section 107 of the Copyright Act to determine whether Anthropic's uses of the Authors' copyrighted works constituted fair use, separately evaluating the different uses at issue. Weighing the factors, the Bartz court concluded that Anthropic's use of the Authors' books to train the LLMs was fair use. Specifically, the court found that: The first factor (purpose and character of the use) strongly favored fair use because using the works to train the LLMs to generate new text outputs was 'quintessentially transformative.' Key to this finding was that Claude includes software to ensure that it does not output infringing content (and the Authors did not allege that any output was infringing). The court acknowledged that its analysis may change if the outputs were infringing. The second factor (nature of the copyrighted work) weighed against fair use because the court accepted, at the summary judgment stage, that: the Authors' published works contained expressive elements; and the works were selected for their expressive qualities. The third factor (amount and substantiality of the portion used) favored fair use because, although Anthropic copied the Authors' entire works, this was reasonably necessary given the extensive data needed to train the LLMs. The court also stated that what matters is the amount and substantiality of what is made accessible to the public, again noting that there was no allegation or evidence that consumer-facing outputs were infringing. The fourth factor (effect on the potential market) favored fair use because: The district court also considered whether Anthropic's copying of the Authors' works to build its central digital library was fair use. The court separately considered works that were: Lawfully purchased in print format and converted to digital format, after which the print versions were destroyed and the digital versions were not redistributed. Copied from pirate websites without authorization by or compensation to the Authors. For the purchased print copies, the district court held that their conversion for a digital library was a fair use. The court found: The first factor favored fair use because: converting the works from physical to digital format for storage and searchability was a transformative use; and Anthropic did not create additional copies or redistribute the digital versions. The second factor weighed against fair use based on the presumptively (at the summary judgment stage) expressive nature of the works. The third factor favored fair use because copying the entire work was necessary for the purpose of digital conversion and storage. The fourth factor was neutral, as the format change may have displaced some digital purchases, but this did not relate to a market the Copyright Act entitles the Authors to exploit. However, for the pirated library copies downloaded without authorization, the district court found no fair use justification and denied summary judgment to Anthropic. Anthropic copied these pirated works, as a substitute to purchasing them, to build a digital library available for any number of prospective uses (and maintained copies in the library even after deciding they would not be used to train the LLMs). The court held this use is not transformative. The court further recognized that the pirated copies directly displaced demand for purchased copies on a one-to-one basis and that condoning such piracy as fair use would destroy the publishing market. The court rejected Anthropic's arguments that the eventual transformative use of some copies for training the LLMs excused the initial piracy. Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc.: N.D. Cal. On June 25, 2025, the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted summary judgment in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. to Meta Platforms, Inc., finding that Meta's use of the plaintiffs' copyrighted books to train its GenAI tool was transformative and fair use. However, the court stated its belief that the fair use defense is likely to be unsuccessful in other, similar cases where the copyright owners adequately show the dilutive harm that GenAI has on the general market for these works. (2025 WL 1752484 (N.D. Cal. June 25, 2025).) The plaintiffs, thirteen authors, filed a lawsuit against Meta alleging direct copyright infringement, among other claims, based on Meta's use of unauthorized downloads of their books (from online shadow libraries) to train the LLMs underlying Llama, Meta's text-generating GenAI tool. After discovery, the parties cross-moved for summary judgment on whether Meta's use of the books was fair use. The district court analyzed the fair use factors under Section 107 of the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 107). In support of its finding that the first fair use factor (purpose and character of the use) favored fair use, the district court: Held that Meta's use was highly transformative because it used the plaintiffs' books only to train LLMs, while the purpose of the books is to entertain and educate readers. The Kadrey court noted that transformative use does not insulate a defendant from infringement liability or even determine the first fair use factor. It is one aspect of the fair use analysis, and there are circumstances where market harm (the fourth factor) can be grounds to reject the defense for a transformative use. Rejected the plaintiffs' law professor amici argument that the purpose and character of the parties' uses were similar because Meta's use of a book to train the LLMs was like a professor's use of a book to train a student. The district court noted that: an LLM ingests text only to learn statistical patterns, not to interpret and understand its meaning as a student does; and Meta's use was not analogous to giving a book to one person, but rather it was to create a tool that everyone can use to exponentially multiply creative expression in a way that teaching a person does not. Rejected the plaintiffs' argument that Meta's use was not transformative because Llama's output mimics and effectively repackages the plaintiffs' works. The evidence showed that Meta programmed Llama to be unable to regurgitate training content, and the plaintiffs' experts were unable to prompt the tool to generate more than 50 words from any of the plaintiffs' books. Recognized that Meta's commercial use (and expectation of 460 billion to 1.4 trillion dollars in revenue over the next ten years) tends to weigh against fair use, but this did not tilt the first fair use factor in the plaintiffs' favor. Recognized that Meta's unauthorized downloading of the books from shadow libraries without compensation to the plaintiffs may indicate bad faith, but questioned the relevance of bad faith and found it did not sway the first factor in this case. The court noted that Meta's practice might be more relevant to the character of the use if the plaintiffs showed the practice benefited the shadow libraries and furthered their unlawful activities. The court held that the second factor (nature of the copyrighted work) weighed against fair use because the plaintiffs' books, consisting mostly of highly expressive works, are entitled to strong copyright protection. However, the court noted that this factor rarely plays a significant role in the fair use analysis. The district court acknowledged that the third factor (amount and substantiality of the portion used) was not particularly relevant in this case. However, it concluded that the factor favored a fair use finding because copying the entirety of the books was reasonable given Meta's transformative purpose, as LLMs perform better when trained on complete, high-quality data. The district court started its review of the fourth fair use factor (effect on the potential market for the copyrighted work) by acknowledging it to be the most important factor in the fair use analysis. It explained that the relevant question is whether the defendant's use will function as a market substitute for the plaintiffs' works. The court rejected the plaintiffs' arguments that: Meta's unauthorized use of the plaintiffs' books affects the market for licensing the works for the purpose of training its LLMs. The district court held that this is not a harm that the Copyright Act seeks to prevent. Otherwise, every copyright infringement plaintiff could argue that it has been deprived of the right to license the use at issue in the case. Llama is capable of reproducing portions of their books, therefore harming the market for the plaintiffs' works. However, the evidence showed that even adversarial prompting designed to make Llama regurgitate the plaintiffs' works yielded only 50-word snippets from the books, which could not have a meaningful effect on the market for the plaintiffs' books. Although the plaintiffs focused only on these two alleged harms, the district court analyzed a third form of harm, that is, GenAI's ability to rapidly generate countless works that compete with and reduce demand for the plaintiffs' works, even if the AI-generated works are non-infringing. The court referred to this form of harm as market dilution (or indirect substitution), which it noted is still market substitution, could reduce the incentive for authors to create, and is the specific harm that copyright aims to prevent. The court stated that market dilution harm is far greater (and therefore more relevant) in the case of GenAI than in other cases involving individual secondary works or digital tools, such as Google Books, because GenAI can quickly flood the market with millions of competing works. The court stated that it 'seems likely' that market dilution will often cause the fourth fair use factor to decisively favor plaintiffs in similar cases. However, in this case, because Meta introduced evidence that its use of the plaintiffs' works did not cause market harm and the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate the contrary, the district court (seemingly reluctantly) found that the fourth factor weighed in favor of fair use. In granting summary judgment to Meta on its fair use defense, the district court stated that its ruling should not indicate that Meta's use of copyrighted content to train its LLMs was lawful, but only that the plaintiffs did not show the market dilution that GenAI causes. The court further surmised that, in many circumstances, the unauthorized use of copyright-protected works to train GenAI models will be infringing and developers will therefore need to pay copyright owners for the right to use their materials for this purpose.
Boston Globe
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
First Amendment lawsuit claims R.I. school district blocked a critic from social media accounts
The lawsuit argues that this 'censorship' violates Mayer's First Amendment rights to speak, and to petition the government for redress of grievances. Advertisement 'Just as public officials may not preclude persons from participating in the public comment portion of a town hall meeting based on their viewpoints or arbitrarily deny members of the public access to the meeting, Superintendent Bartz cannot ban users from the @SmithfieldSuper X account page because she dislikes their opinions or require formal approval in order to allow them access,' the lawsuit states. Get Rhode Map A weekday briefing from veteran Rhode Island reporters, focused on the things that matter most in the Ocean State. Enter Email Sign Up Bartz issued a statement Monday, saying the school district was aware of the lawsuit but has not been served with the legal documents yet. 'We cannot comment on specifics of any pending litigation,' Bartz said. 'We take our responsibility to serve and communicate with our community seriously. Our district remains committed to maintaining open and respectful communication with all families and members of the Smithfield community.' Advertisement The lawsuit says that both X accounts are used to announce and describe school district policies and office operations, share content produced for the town's schools, and communicate with constituents. The lawsuit argues that access to such official accounts cannot be limited based on the identity or viewpoint of those seeking access. The suit asks the US District Court in Providence to declare the blocking of Mayer's access unconstitutional, and to issue an injunction prohibiting officials from banning anyone else 'on the basis of viewpoint.' 'I'm pursuing this case because I think it's the right thing to do,' Mayer said in a statement. 'The school district is doing the wrong thing by restricting access to their accounts. All of the public deserves access to their social media pages and the information they post.' David Cass, and ACLU cooperating attorney, said, 'Access to a city or town's social media accounts for information and comment is crucial for citizens to engage in discourse with their representatives. Improper restrictions of social media accounts by cities and towns hinder open discourse and access for meaningful participation with our government and diminishes our democracy.' Edward Fitzpatrick can be reached at
Elle
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
Why Thriller Author Andrea Bartz Thinks You Should Start Your Own Newsletter ‘Now'
Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. Andrea Bartz hasn't 'made it.' Not yet. She doubts she ever will. Her latest thriller, The Last Ferry Out, is her fifth book in six years—now part of a list that includes the New York Times bestseller and 2021 Reese's Book Club pick We Were Never Here—and she's enormously grateful for the success and ongoing longevity of her writing career. But she also acknowledges that 'the goalposts,' as she puts it, never stop shifting. 'You could see that as, I don't know, depressing,' she says. 'But I really think it's freeing. It's empowering to know that, like any other career, a writing life is going to be a marathon, not a sprint.' These nuggets of literary wisdom spring up naturally in conversations with Bartz, who's used her penchant for advice to drive readers to her Substack newsletter, Get It Write, as well as her own books. A decade ago, she was a magazine editor for publications including Glamour and Psychology Today, but after one too many outlets folding and journalists laid off, she realized she needed 'some project where I can't go into work on a random Tuesday and find out it's been taken away from me.' A book would be hers. She 'got serious' about the draft that would become her debut novel, The Lost Night, and balanced freelance journalism with fiction writing as her book sales slowly supplied greater and greater percentages of her income. Now, she considers herself a full-time author who conducts a 'little freelancing on the side.' But she's never once forsworn the tap-dancing mentality journalism taught her. She's currently writing for the screen; working on her next novel; and running her Substack, which has grown into an author community she adores. 'As the world feels scarier and scarier, and we feel—or, at least, I feel—more cut off from other people, we don't have the same community building that we had generations ago,' Bartz says. 'So, finding literary community, especially online, is necessary for surviving long-term in this industry and not feeling so lonely or so frustrated or so gaslit.' The Last Ferry Out is a classic vacation thriller, set on a gorgeous (fictional) island where Bartz's protagonist, Abby, has arrived to learn more about the final days of her fiancée, Eszter, who died of an allergic reaction on the island. But as she seeks closure, Abby instead learns that the circumstances around Eszter's death were unusual—and, perhaps, malicious. As Bartz has promoted the book both in-person and online, she has repeatedly underscored that even an 'escapist' thriller like her own can have a wide-reaching and ambitious impact. As she wrote to her Substack followers this week, 'Let's make this book a hit and show publishers that queer stories are worth investing in!' Ahead, Bartz discusses the origin story behind her latest suspense; the politics and pleasures of the thriller genre writ large; how authors should build communities online; and the benefits of 'radical candor' with her readers. 'So many people have helped me get where I am,' she says, 'so I am constantly keeping an ear and an eye open, asking, 'How can I show up for this community? How can I be someone who is a net good [in the publishing industry], who's helping other people?'' Yes. In February 2020—before I knew that that was epically lucky timing—I spent a month traveling solo around Mexico. And everywhere that I went, I met these really lovely welcoming expats, these close-knit communities who swept me in, welcoming me into their ranks while I was there. I went salsa dancing with some of them and I did beach bonfires with other ones. I really liked all these people, and I was sort of jealous of them, because here they are living in paradise full-time, and I was like, 'What's going on? All they have in common is that they parachuted out of their normal lives?' And that got me thinking: What are they running away from, and/or what are they seeking? Would these people even be friends if it weren't for the fact they all speak English? The mind of a thriller writer always churns, so I love trying to capture close-knit, closed-door social milieu. So with that little knot of expats, I thought, 'Okay, what if we took that group and we threw a dead body into the center?' Which is what I always do. And that gave me the idea for The Last Ferry Out, which is about a woman traveling to the island where her fiancée died in an accident a few months earlier, meeting these enchanting expats there, but the more she digs, the more she begins to suspect that maybe it was not an accident at all, and she might actually be trapped on an island with her fiancée's killer. When I'm working on a manuscript, I need to have some kind of swirling energy force at the center of it that's a question I don't know the answer to, or I don't know exactly how I feel about it yet. Expats were such a great example because I was envious of them, but do I think their lifestyle is unethical? Is there something weird about the ownership that they claim to have over a place and the sort of disdain they have for tourists when they are long-term tourists, in a sense? The question of who owns a place is so interesting. And I knew that I was going to figure out how I felt about it via my narrators and them interacting with this island and with the community there, both the locals and the expats. Eszter, the woman who died on the island, is first-generation; her parents are Hungarian. And that was partially based on my own life. My grandparents are Hungarian; they were immigrants. They brought my mom over when she was young, and they have immense pride in the U.S. They very much care about being the 'good' kind of immigrants, and they feel this very strong sense of American pride. But, also, nobody ever called them expats. They are immigrants. I wanted to introduce those elements as well and think about how they would affect Eszter's thinking about this group of people who have made this beautiful island their playground—but also they do have a genuine affection for it. I don't know that I came to any big conclusive answers by the end, but it was fun for me to explore what it means to call a place home. I think all art is political. I think if it weren't, then there wouldn't be forces working as hard as they are right now to silence artists in different ways and to ban books and to keep people from considering other things. I think, especially for fiction, when you read a novel, you are stepping into the shoes of another character, by definition. You are forced to be in an empathetic experience for eight hours or however long it takes you to read the book. And I think that's such a mind-blowing privilege that we authors have, where we are up in people's imaginations. Imagination is where we can dream about things being different, and we can envision a better world, and we can question deeply held beliefs. It's just so powerful and incredible to me that I get to create these worlds that are fun and exciting to read, but then also can hopefully make people—whether they realize it or not—think about things differently. A really surface-level example: This is a queer thriller, but it's not about queerness. So if somebody doesn't have any friends or doesn't have personal experiences with women who are in relationships with women like myself, now you do. You have me! And you have this story, these fictional characters, and you can see it's just like any other relationship. I think of my books as having an obligation to bring into the light elements of the female and non-male experience that are not something we like to look at or talk about as a society. Across all my books, I have women sharing their shame, their guilt, their anger, how they're biting it back, how they're keeping it in, embarrassment about ways that they're not meeting societal norms or being the person that society has told them that they should be. We as women are way more angry than we are allowed to feel and express. So let's talk about it. It's not just you. There's nothing wrong with you. So that's an element that, as I'm writing, I'm challenging myself not to hold back. If I ever start to feel like, 'Oh my gosh, this is too personal. This is too much. I don't know if I can do this.' That's when I'm like, 'You absolutely need. You are onto something real and deep, and that's the goal.' We women feel scared a lot of the time. Maybe all people feel scared a lot of the time. So there's something really soothing in choosing to dive into a world where the fear is the reason you're there, but you know, as a reader, it will be fine. You can close the book when it's done. I have a lot of anxious tendencies, and so I joke about how I'll be in a totally normal, neutral situation with friends, and I'll be the creepy one who's like, 'Wouldn't it be weird if in that window over there we saw...' and just whatever terrifying premise for a thriller pops out of my mouth. There is some empowerment and agency in, for me, writing—and, for many people, reading—these fictional experiences of, What would you do? How would you get yourself out? How would you cope? How would you take charge of a situation by becoming a detective or an amateur detective who's trying to investigate and put all the pieces together? Even as the world gets increasingly scary, it's nice for us to drop into these controlled worlds where we are in charge of the adrenaline, we're the ones deciding to indulge in the cortisol, and we're doing it for pleasure—instead of doing it because it's forced on us by the headlines every day. I had a newsletter that was a very ugly thing that I made on Mailchimp, and I hated doing it. I begrudgingly did it because people had told me, 'You need to have an author newsletter. That's the best way to maintain your community.' And so I did it when I had to, but I really dreaded it. Then I discovered that the algorithm had changed on Instagram and TikTok and nobody was seeing anything anymore. My follower count had gotten fairly healthy, and yet only 2 to 300 people were actually seeing anything that I did. I had discovered from playing around on Reels and on TikTok that what people liked most was the behind-the-scenes author stuff; the candid, unfiltered author life; the advice for craft and for publishing and for getting an agent. At the same time, I was wanting to pull away from freelance writing and was constantly having ideas and having to wait to go through an editor and get someone to approve something. And I thought, 'Okay, a Substack is basically a blog. What if I started a blog that was all the advice I want to give, all the things I want to share, all the realness, all of the calls for community and talking to one another and being in this together? What if I just made some columns that I'm excited about that make sense to me and nobody else has to sign off on it?' So I launched it in, I think, January of 2024. It's been really rewarding to work on, and I've met a ton of great people through it. There are people who wouldn't otherwise know about me and my books who, through the Substack, have become what feels like internet friends. It still feels like Substack is one of the good places on the internet. I don't know if it's going to change. I don't know if we're at the end of the era of it being the good place to go, but right now it feels pretty good. So anyone who is thinking about taking the leap, I say do it now. Think about something you can offer to the community. Think about something you can do that's a little different, that ties into your books and ties into your author brand but feels unique. Relatedly, think about what regular features you can offer, because this is going to make it easier for you to keep coming up with post ideas. Do you want to give recommendations every week? Do you want to corner the market on some kind of niche that has to do with all of your books? Do you want to be sharing news? Do you want to be talking to other people? Because starting from absolute scratch every single time—if you're determined to post, let's say, once a week—is going to be really hard. Finally, pay attention to what people seem to like and what works. Looking at my numbers made me realize that by far the posts that did best for me were the ones when I talked about failure and talked about rejection and talked about being down in the dumps about my career. I was initially nervous to talk about stuff like that, because I thought readers would be like, 'Okay, white lady who had a New York Times bestselling book. Enough.' But then I was delighted to learn that that's what people in this community do want. When we talk about the writing life ... you really want to diversify all the things that you're doing. I'm learning how to write for the screen right now, and my next book is going to be in a slightly different genre; it's going to be a little more horror. I think anyone who is interested in this career should know your job description is going to keep changing. And, hopefully, that is exciting to you. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
