ALLi Director Orna Ross unpacks the first court ruling on AI’s use of copyrighted books and why it matters to indie authors. She explains how the judge balanced “fair use” with pirate copying, then walks through ALLi’s Four Cs—consent, compensation, clarity, and curiosity—to show authors where the real battles lie. Along the way, Ross offers clear steps for safeguarding your work, engaging readers, and keeping your creativity alive while tech giants and courts hammer out the details.
Listen to the Podcast: What the First AI Copyright Ruling Means for Authors
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About the Host
Orna Ross launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller’s “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.
Read the Transcripts
Orna Ross: Hello and welcome to Self-Publishing with ALLi. I'm Orna Ross, here today with the Creative Self-Publishing Stream.
Today I want to talk about the ruling that came through this week about AI and authors. It's a really big deal, the first legal ruling about fair use and tech use of author books to feed their language models and what it means.
I'm not going to focus a huge amount in today's episode on the legal back and forth, there's still stuff to be worked out.
Impact of the Recent Anthropic Ruling on Indie Authors
Orna Ross: But really what I want to do today is ask what does it mean for indie authors, for our work, for our rights, our livelihoods? It is a big moment. All the stakeholders have been waiting for the first ruling because that always has an effect on the rest, and there are a load of legal challenges to what's going on at the moment.
So, what does it mean for us? This being the creative self-publishing stream, I want to focus on what it means for our creative energy, because I'm witnessing in the community that a lot of people are feeling defeated by this and anxious, worried about what it means for their future, whether there's any point in even writing anymore.
I'm hearing people say things like that.
So, I would like to argue that it's important that we stay strong here and connected, and curious and creative. That's super important.
The need for that is not going away in the world. On the contrary, it's really important that we hold and maintain our creative approach as creatives, as writers, as authors. Despite the content avalanches that are being generated as I speak and all the automated words that are going out there, we mustn't just fling up our hands.
ALLi's Ethical Guidelines and Practical Tips for Indie Authors & AI
Orna Ross: So, I'd like to work through ALLi's guidelines.
We have ethical guidelines and practical tips around this, which have been in place for some time now, and we're constantly updating those depending on what's going on.
And the new changes, because as everything changes very fast here, we are on the back foot. The tech boys move fast and break things, but there is room too for those who move in a more slow and considered manner and to aim to make things.
We'll talk about protecting your work, nurturing your readership, and staying creatively confident. That's what I want to look at today, no matter what technology throws at us.
So, those guidelines are on selfpublishingadvice.org/ai, and I'll be talking through some aspects of them today.
Acknowledging the Authors Behind the Anthropic Case
Orna Ross: Before I get into it, I'd like to thank the three authors who brought the case. They are heroes all, they're investigative journalists and activists, and fabulous writers. Cases led by Andrea Bart, whose novels include, We Were Never Here and The Last Ferry Out. She's supported by Charles Graeber, who wrote The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder, and a book about immunotherapy and the Race to Cure.
Also, Kirk Wallace Johnson, who wrote The Feather Thief and Fishman and The Dragon.
A lot of these works are investigative journalist type works. They also are involved in a non-profit organization that helps to settle Iraqi refugees in the US.
So, these are people who care and that is the main thing to keep in mind. Robots may “write”, but they don't care, and we do, and that does make all the difference.
So, let's get into it.
Why was the Anthropic Case Deemed “Fair Use”?
Orna Ross: As I said, this was a really big moment this week. There are so many cases out there, not just around books.
This month, we just heard that Disney and Universal are taking a lawsuit against Midjourney. The BBC is considering legal action over un-authorized use of its content.
This is a big question that isn't going to go away and is heating up as we speak.
This first ruling found that Anthropic's fair use defense, it found for it, in effect.
So, this will pave the way for further legal judgments. We'll go into a little bit more of what exactly that meant, but he (the judge) also acknowledged, and this is key too, that Anthropic had violated the author's rights by saving pirated copies of their works in their creation of a “central library of all the books in the world”, that's what they essentially set out to create.
So, Anthropic is backed by Amazon and by Google's parent company, Alphabet. So, it could still face up to $150,000 in damages per copyrighted work if that second part of the thing around pirated works was to find in the author's favor.
Now, don't get excited by that. First of all, there's a long way to go before finding fines in that way. But secondly, it does not mean that all authors are eligible for that sort of payout. If things were to go in our way, and if we were to develop a licensing, deal with the tech companies, et cetera. We're talking about if anything like that were to emerge, micropayments that acknowledge copyright and how important copyright is. These huge damages are not relevant to the bulk of authors, so just want to manage your expectations there.
The finding, it's fair use. Why is it fair use?
So, the judge, and I'm quoting here, said, “like any reader, aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic's large language models, trained upon works, not to race ahead and replicate or supplant those works, but to turn a hard corner and create something different.
If this training process reasonably required making copies within the large language model or otherwise, those copies were engaged in a transformative use.”
So, the authors hadn't claimed, and the judge noted this, the authors hadn't claimed that the training was an infringement, and I still hear a lot of authors talking about big tech use of books as an infringement issue. It is not an infringement of copyright, and that has been acknowledged here and is now a matter of legal case.
As the judge said, if the authors were claiming infringement, it would've been a completely different case with a completely different outcome.
So, in summary, the copies that Anthropic used to train their LLMs, their large language models, were justified as a fair use. They had two approaches. They converted purchased print library copies into digital copies, and they also downloaded pirated works.
The copies used and purchased, that was justified to as fair use, but the downloaded pirated copies used to build up their central library, that was not justified as fair use and every factor, in fact, points against fair use. So, it would make an absolute nonsense of copyright law if they were to judge that the use of pirated copies constitutes fair use, so it doesn't.
Anthropic said they were pleased by the judge's recognition that it's use of the works was transformative and therefore fair, but it disagreed with the decision to hold a trial about how some of the books were obtained and used, essentially the scraping of pirated work.
It said it remained confident in its case; it was evaluating its options.
At the time of my recording this, the authors have not yet commented, if they are going to.
So, what does it all mean?
ALLi's Four Cs for Indie Author AI Advocacy
Orna Ross: ALLi has four Cs for author AI advocacy that we kind of work around and think about when we're doing all the various different tasks that exploring AI and copyright involves, and they are consent, compensation, clarity, and curiosity.
I'd like to just look at the ruling in the light of those four Cs of ours and bring you through them, because you may not be aware of them, but also look at the judge's ruling in the light of our four Cs.
So, number one is consent. We argue that consent is important and that copyright without consent is meaningless. That consent is a cornerstone of creative and legal ethics, and that without consent, AI developers are infringing on our rights, if not specifically on our copyright in a particular work.
So, at the moment, some of the companies and models offer a limited opt-out option for authors, and what we'd like to see is actually some form of opt-in, and recognizing the complexities around that. Time doesn't permit me to go into all of those in this episode, but opt-in we believe is possible.
One of the arguments that is being made around AI to authors and other creators at the moment is that things have gone too far and it's impossible to change things at this stage, and it will be impossible to organize things like opt-in and compensation and so on.
We argue strongly that it is not at all impossible if the will is there. So, that's consent.
Compensation is where we're circling very much as an organization. So, we haven't done anything on challenging the copyright in our works issue as some other author organizations have raised because we don't believe it to be, and this case seems to bear that out.
But we do believe that authors should receive compensation, and creators should receive compensation from these companies that are making massive millions and billions. The amounts of money that is going to be generated built on creator work is massive, and authors are not looking for a big deal here, but we are looking for the concept of copyright to be upheld. In other words, that big tech can't go taking pirated works, works that have been pirated, illegal works, to create their systems and not acknowledge the legal creators.
So, we have been calling for a collective licensing system and we believe it can be modelled. Organizations like the ALCS: Author Licensing and Collection Society.
They manage micropayments for photocopying and other types of use of authors works. They manage micropayments for authors, and that's the kind of scheme that we think would ensure fairness without everybody having to go into litigation on every book, which obviously, is it possible?
So, a collective licensing model, like those already in use for photocopying and library lending, that can ensure that authors are paid when their work is used in training. Authors opt-in and the AI companies pay the fees to the collecting society that distributes the royalties.
This gives us a scalable model that's inclusive of all authors, and this is really important, the indie published authors as well as those with big trade publishers, because in response to the legal battles some AI companies have struck deals with specific publishers. OpenAI, for example, recently struck deals in France and Spain with newspapers, and the Financial Times has also struck a deal.
Conde Nast, the Atlantic Time Magazine in the US, they've negotiated agreements with OpenAI. Microsoft has partnered with Harper Collins, one of the big book publishers, obviously, of relevance to authors specifically for non-fiction content there, and Amazon has a deal with the New York Times, and so on. Reuters has licensed its content to Meta.
This means that major publishers are being paid, sometimes being paid millions for their content, but where are the creators in there, in terms of what they are receiving as a result of that? All of that's very hazy from most of these deals.
And of course, self-published and often smaller indie publishing houses are excluded from these private deals.
So, while it's good in that it signals evidence that we can use in terms of advocating for collective licensing, the tech companies are acknowledging copyright, they are making deals, that's important, there is a real risk of exclusion here for indie authors.
Our works are being used no less widely. They're often just as vulnerable to piracy. We all know our work is being pirated all the time, and unlicensed scraping is going on all the time.
So, as authors who retain our own rights and who are increasingly selling directly to readers, and that's all good, we need a collective system that doesn't rely on traditional publishing intermediaries for authors to be compensated. And indeed, as I say, there is little evidence of how authors in these trade publishing company deals are actually being compensated. So, that's the compensation.
Number three is clarity, and clarity and transparency to me is really key. One of the great things about this court case and the other court cases is that they bring out what's actually going on behind the scenes because the tech companies are not sharing, to put it mildly.
We have a right as rights holders to know which works are being used in training, how they're being used and when they're being used, and to say that it is impossible for that information to be available, that it's too much or it's too big, is simply untrue. If you can scan print books, you have a registry, you can share it.
So, one of the things that was interesting in this case that came out this week was the details around this. The judge stated that Anthropic had acquired at least 5 million copies of books from LibGen, and at least 2 million from Pirate Library Mirror; two notorious pirate sites.
They had also used the famous Books3, which came out last year in the discussions around Meta, who were revealed to also have used Books3.
So, essentially in February, 2024, Anthropic hired the former head of partnerships for Google's book scanning project, Tom Turvy. He had been tasked with “obtaining all the books in the world”, while avoiding, “legal practice and business slog” as much as possible. Included in that, obviously, is us and our rights.
He initially did pursue licensing with publishers, but according to the court, had he kept up those conversations, he might have reached an agreement to license copies with specific publishers, but he didn't.
He let those conversations wither and instead Turvy and his team, they emailed book distributors and retailers about bulk purchasing print copies for Anthropic's research library.
So, they spent millions of dollars to purchase millions of books, often in a used condition, and then stripped the books from their bindings, cut the pages and scanned books into digital form, discarding the paper originals.
So, each of those scanned books resulted in a PDF copy, and they used this machine-readable text and bibliographic metadata to create their model. As they said, they wanted to amass this central library of all the books in the world to retain forever, and the court found that there were two kinds of aspects to what they had done.
One was to build this central library, and the other was to train its LLM. So, they kept the library and invested in more tools for building it out, with a view that it might have future use. So, even if it wasn't specifically used for training the LLM, books that weren't, they are stored in this big library that nobody knows about, and similar things are going on.
We got glimpse last year when Meta admitted to using the pirated data set. We saw how they had internal disquiet and debates for a long time about using pirated materials, but nonetheless, decided to just go ahead, with Mark Zuckerberg's approval, and essentially, they did that to save time, but mostly to save money.
So, it's all very clear now what is actually going on, and that clarity and transparency that emerges through the courts helps us. But we are calling on the tech companies to actually be clearer, be more transparent, let the rights holders know what is happening with their books. So, that is clarity.
Finally, just curiosity. I think this is the most important one for each of us to think about.
As these AI tools evolve, our creative awareness has to evolve with it. As I said at the beginning, throwing up our hands in despair or equally being ignorant about the subtleties and nuances of the different legal points and also the business points around this, doesn't serve us well.
So, ALLi encourages our members to not just to resist new technologies and in fact, not to resist them at all, but to engage with them with discernment, absolutely, and with creative curiosity.
So, learning how AI may serve or hinder our publishing, our business activities, our outreach to readers, and our writing.
So, ethical engagement and not blanket fear or passive acceptance is the creative stance, and that is the point of view we have taken at ALLi from the start.
We are pushing for more creator friendly models, doing a lot of work in the background on that with other organizations. Also, observing closely what's happening in different countries. Some countries are more creator friendly than others. So, the EU copyright directive of what's going on in France and Germany is interesting and perhaps promising.
We support any solution that upholds authors rights, that provides clarity on how works are used, that enables consent-based participation, and that ensures a micropayment for its importance in recognizing copyright. It's not that it's going to make any difference to anybody's bottom line, but it is really important as creators that we uphold copyright because that is our legal standing.
Even though copyright is an incomplete system, even though piracy is happening all the time, authors and publishers are able to make money from books because of the legal law of copyright, and there is no need to see copyright eroded just because of the development of AI.
The other aspect around curiosity and creativity, I think, is that we need to understand the creators who will do well in this new environment, where there is masses of content, are those who understand how to build a readership.
As indie authors, again, it highlights the importance of us learning how to market our books, learning about our genre, how our particular readers make their journey to us, how we set up and position ourselves as writers, how we develop what the marketers call our author brand.
All of these things are super important, ever more important in the new worlds that we're all living in. It's already here. It's happening all around us, and opting out is not an option if we want to be successful authors in a new landscape.
What ALLi is Doing to Support Indie Authors Around AI
Orna Ross: So, while ALLi is calling on governments to update copyright legislation to reflect the realities of what's going on at the moment and on the AI developers to stop their untransparent and unlicensed ingestion of pirated works, and to engage with the rights holders to build fair licensing models, and on other author organizations and alliances to get together to collaborate internationally, because this is an international issue and the legal people can only deal with it on a country by country jurisdiction, by jurisdiction basis, but indie authors are operating globally all over the world. So, we need to collaborate internationally to establish transparent and scalable licensing infrastructure that works around the world.
While we are working on that, we are calling on our members for support, obviously, but mainly to remain curious and informed, and to keep on advocating for systems that reflect the value of our labor.
So, as I said, if you want to read more about ALLi's stance around this, check it out at selfpublishingadvice.org/ai.
If you have any thoughts about what you'd specifically like to see ALLi doing, please do drop us a line anytime about that: [email protected].
We will probably be polling our members soon with some specific questions around things that we're trying to do in terms of establishing an international authors coalition around this, and we welcome your thoughts if you have particularly engaged with this issue beyond your own author business. If you have thoughts and ideas, we really would love to hear them.
So, the landscape is shifting, and AI is disrupting how our books are being written and published and read, no question, and we need to engage with it.
No question also, the protections we need as authors are not yet in place and there's a lot of noise and everybody has an opinion.
But I just want to leave you with the thought that readers still crave real voices. They want the truth. They want humanity. They want imagination.
You can't outproduce the machines and you shouldn't try, and I shudder at the advice that's going around to authors at the moment about pressing a button to produce a book, and I'm sure you do too.
Anyone who is a genuine writer has no need to try and outproduce. We don't need to think about the massive tsunami of content that is out there. That's not who we are. That's not what we are about.
We need to stay close and connected to everything that makes us write. It's really important that we keep on writing and everything that makes us publish. It's really important that we keep on publishing and strengthen author publishing, genuine author publishing that engages readers with our own words, our stories, our passions, our how-to’s, our advice, our style, our soul. Everything that we do is really important here.
Keep on writing, keep on reaching out to your readers. Keep on building your body of work and your community. That's where your power lies.
Build your brand, know what you stand for, and put it out there. All of those things take time to evolve. Finding your voice, reaching your readers, these are things that almost never go away really for the author/publisher, but that, as I said, is where your true power lies.
If you're a member of ALLi, we are working every day to support you and represent you through these changes. If you're not yet a member, do consider joining us. Together, we are stronger.
Thank you for listening. Happy writing and happy publishing. Till next time, bye-bye.
