Judge Delays Preliminary Approval in Anthropic Copyright Settlement; Publishers Weekly, September 9, 2025

  Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly; Judge Delays Preliminary Approval in Anthropic Copyright Settlement

"Alsup signaled his discomfort with the proposal in a filing released the evening before the September 8 hearing, writing that he was “disappointed” that attorneys representing the author plaintiffs had left “important questions to be answered in the future, including respecting the Works List, Class List, Claim Form." He was especially concerned for works with multiple claimants with regards to the notification process, voicing worry over what would happen if one party wanted to opt-out of the settlement and the other did not...

In a statement, Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said the Guild was “confused” by the court’s suggestion that the Guild and AAP were working behind the scenes in ways that could pressure authors to accept the settlement “when that is precisely the opposite of our proposed role as informational advisors to the working group.”

The goal of the working group, which had been proposed by lawyers for the class, “is to ensure that authors’ interests are fully represented and to bring our expertise... to the discussions with complete transparency,” Rasenberger continued. “There are industry norms that we want to make sure are accounted for.”...

AAP CEO Maria Pallante offered an even more vigorous explanation of AAP’s role, as well as the role of the Guild, in the proceedings. “The Association of American Publishers and the Authors’ Guild are not-for-profits that have worked hard to support counsel in the case and to make sure that authors and publishers have the information they need,” Pallante said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the Court today demonstrated a lack of understanding of how the publishing industry works.”"

AI Challenges, Freedom to Read Top AAP Annual Meeting Discussions; Publishers Weekly, May 13, 2024

Jim Milliot , Publishers Weekly; AI Challenges, Freedom to Read Top AAP Annual Meeting Discussions

"The search for methods of reining in technology companies’ unauthorized copying of copyrighted materials to build generative AI models was the primary theme of this year's annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers, held May 9 over Zoom...

“To protect society, we will need a forward-thinking scheme of legal rules and enforcement authority across numerous jurisdictions and disciplines—not only intellectual property, but also national security, trade, privacy, consumer protection, and human rights, to name a few,” Pallante said. “And we will need ethical conduct.”...

Newton-Rex began in the generative AI space in 2010, and now leads the Fairly Trained, which launched in January as a nonprofit that seeks to certify AI companies that don't train models on copyrighted work without creators’ consent (Pallante is an advisor for the company.) He founded the nonprofit after leaving a tech company, Stability, that declined to use a licensing model to get permission to use copyrighted materials in training. Stability, Newton-Rex said, “argues that you can train on whatever you want. And it's a fair use in the United States, and I think this is not only incorrect, but I think it's ethically unforgivable. And I think we have to fight it with everything we have.”

“The old rules of copyright are gone,” said Maria Ressa, cofounder of the online news company Rappler and winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, in her keynote. “We are literally standing on the rubble of the world that was. If we don’t recognize it, we can’t rebuild it.”

Ressa added that, in a social media world drowning in misinformation and manipulation, “it is crucial that we get back to facts.” Messa advised publishers to “hold the line” in protecting their IP, and to continue to defend the importance of truth: “You cannot have rule of law if you do not have integrity of facts.”"

Sci-Hub Controversy Triggers Publishers’ Critique of Librarian; Library Journal, 8/25/16

Lisa Peet, Library Journal; Sci-Hub Controversy Triggers Publishers’ Critique of Librarian:

"“I was surprised that AAP would take the tactic of trying to say ‘don’t talk about Sci-Hub,’ as if ignoring the problem, or not shining light on it, would make it go away,” Joseph told LJ. “That seems kind of a backwards way to approach this issue to me, because what we’re seeing, frankly, is Sci-Hub really growing in popularity.”

Sci-Hub’s various clashes with the world of scholarly publishing, Joseph noted, is helping to raise awareness of the issues surrounding journal access outside the library walls. “It’s not just a library problem…. When researchers are going to the lengths of using an illegal resource to get access, I think it’s really showing institutions that it’s not a departmental problem. It’s an institutional problem.”

And the problem doesn’t only lie within academia, Gardner added. As a member of ALA, he said, it would be unethical for him to promote Sci-Hub’s use given the constraints of the legal system. “But I do think that copyright is far too strong, and that the system is in need of reform. The reason why services like Sci-Hub exist is because we have a copyright system which is too draconian.”

“This is an area where tempers run high, and I think that reasonable people can disagree,” he said. “There are a lot of people, scholars and librarians, who think that using Sci-Hub is civil disobedience and I’m personally very sympathetic to that argument. But it’s also obvious to me that under the current legal system, this is totally illegal.”

Gardner is working on research that he will present at ACRL’s 2017 conference, again using data from the Science survey to examine Sci-Hub’s potential impact on inter-library loan practices."