Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Judge in Anthropic Lawsuit Rules That Training AI on Copyrighted Works is Fair Use
A mixed bag out of the latest major AI copyright lawsuit, as a federal judge in California has ruled that using copyrighted books to train AI models without authors’ permission is allowed under fair use doctrine, but pirating books for that purpose is likely a violation of copyright law. Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace sued Anthropic, claiming that the tech company used full copies of their books, which were included in the Books3 data set, to train its large language models. Like Meta before them, Anthropic executives have admitted to using pirated books in order “to avoid ‘legal/practice/business slog.”” Meta executives have offered the same explanation in other suit, acknowledging that they initiated conversations with publishers about licensing fees before ultimately deciding it wasn’t worth the time and money.
This is a discouraging ruling for authors and publishers, no doubt about it. But/and it is still very early days for the multitude of AI copyright cases making their way through the courts, and the verdicts so far have not unanimously favored tech companies. (As one example, in February, Thomson Reuters won a similar suit against a medical AI startup that used its copyrighted material without permission.) While I certainly hope we eventually reach a legal agreement that using copyrighted works to train AI without the creators’ permission is not fair use, the finding against Anthropic that use of pirated copies violates copyright law is one step in the right direction. Miles to go before we sleep on this one, folks.
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Marginalia Goes Mainstream
I’m a book annotator from way back, but I don’t quite know what to make of the BookTok trend that has taken marginalia up several complicated, color-coded notches. Armed with highlighters, sticky flags, post-it notes, and a rainbow selection of pens, BookTok creators are turning their books into highly personalized references that you have to see to believe. Some mark key passages, sexy scenes, and memorable moments, while others assign each character a different color and highlight every line of dialogue accordingly. What’s the point? It’s another way to engage with books and display them visually, it’s another point of connection with other readers, and they like doing it. Will they ever actually refer back to these annotations? That’s the wrong question. I don’t get it—if everything is highlighted, isn’t nothing highlighted?—but I don’t have to.
The Books Readers Are Most Excited About This Summer
Drawing on data about which titles its readers have engaged with recently, the New York Times rounds up the 20 books readers are most excited about this summer. Divided evenly into fiction and nonfiction, the list offers a nice variety of genres, subject matter, and seriousness. Whatever your summer reading vibe, you’ll find something here. I can personally vouch for Atmosphere, The Dry Season, and Among Friends, with the (very big) caveat that the betrayal at the heart of Among Friends is a sexual assault that none of the synopses or reviews are mentioning. Presumably, this is an attempt to avoid spoilers, but readers deserve to know when sexual violence is being used as a plot twist.
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