Newsletter 77. The relationship between timing and success, an audio-only imprint for self-publishers, how to license your book for AI, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Thoughts on timing If I’ve learned one thing in 50 years in business, it is that timing matters. Great ideas need good timing to succeed….
The basics of publishing contracts are simple: the publisher agrees to pay you (the author) money up front (an advance) and royalties on book sales, and in exchange you give the publisher exclusive rights to print and sell copies of your book and keep part of the proceeds. But as the economics of publishing have…
When independent analyst Zeus Kerravala wrote up his own analysis of a Gartner “Magic Quadrant” review of vendors offering Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), Gartner insisted that his use of their graphic was a copyright violation. He ended up taking down the post. But the case raises an interesting question: can subscription-based research companies…
The legal future of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and nearly every other large language model (LLM) depends on one question: when a large language model “reads” and “learns” from copyrighted content, is that action protected by the Fair Use provisions of copyright law? Vendors of LLMs insist that training their products on the open web is no…
In its latest announcement of the recent update ChatGPT-4o, OpenAI demonstrated how it more naturally interacts in voice conversations. (You can see some of that in this clip.) The AI’s voice, known as Sky, sounds a lot like the popular actress Scarlett Johansson. The question I’m pondering today is, if the voice was actually built…
Newsletter 24: Why Claudine Gay had to go, a Mickey Mouse horror film, Tolkien’s victorious ghost, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and how to successfully write your book in 2024. Reflections on the plagiarism that brought down Harvard president Claudine Gay Harvard president Claudine Gay has now resigned. She made the…
Week 5: Why books are worth doing, Canadian social media sites eschew news, the revenge of copyright, plus 3 people to follow, 3 great reads, and how to ghostwrite a business book. Work on a project with heft: a book, for example Some people dream of singing on stage or teaching in a classroom —…
The entertainer Sarah Silverman and other authors sued OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Silverman alleged that OpenAI violated her rights by ingesting her book The Bedwetter. Silverman’s suit claims that ChatGPT can summarize parts of the the book, so it has clearly read the book, and since the book is copyrighted, this constitutes a violation….
Copyright law is vague on the concept of fair use. Basically, you can use a little bit of somebody else’s content for free, but not too much. The legal test is very vague. To simplify it for you, here’s a rule of thumb. Fair use is when I use your content. A copyright violation is…