Resources – Authors Alliance

Beyond the Exception: Licensing, Access, and the Realities of Text and Data Mining in the US, UK, and Singapore

September 25, 2025

This is a post by Syn Ong, AI Policy Researcher at Authors Alliance. Authors increasingly rely on text and data mining (TDM) to analyze large corpora across disciplines. Our new working paper, Beyond the Exception: Licensing, Access, and the Realities of Text and Data Mining in the US, UK, and Singapore, finds that formal legal permissions alone do not secure usable access for TDM research. Instead, usable access turns on how statutory rules interact with private licenses, platform architectures, and technological protection measures (TPMs).

Contractual Override: How Private Contracts Undermine the Goals of the Copyright Act for Libraries and Researchers, and What We Can Do About It

August 20, 2025

We’ve written before about the use of contracts limiting author’s access to fair use, including how publisher contracts restrict innovation

When Your Publisher Isn’t the Dream Partner You Hoped For — What Counts as Material Breach of a Publishing Agreement?

August 15, 2025

This is a guest post by Hana Khan-Tareen, who is a Legal Research Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. We appreciate her insight on how authors can best protect their rights.

The Public Interest Corpus Update – NYC Edition

August 13, 2025

Last month, a diverse set of stakeholders gathered at New York University Law School to contribute to an implementation plan

NO FAKES 2025: Another Bill Sacrificing Authors’ Free Expression for Industry Control

July 10, 2025

NO FAKES 2025 does not care about actual deception, impersonation, and harm to the average person; instead, it focuses on enabling political censorship and monetization of celebrity likeness.

The NIH Public Access Policy: Implementation and Feedback

July 1, 2025

The NIH Public Access Policy is in effect as of July 1, 2025. In response, Authors Alliance and SPARC have created a form to collect information about challenges or questions faced by authors, librarians and their institutions in complying with the roll out of new public access policies by federal grant making agencies in compliance with the OSTP directive to make federally funded research freely available to the public immediately upon publication.

Meta Wins on Fair Use for Now, but Court Leaves Door Open for “Market Dilution”

June 26, 2025

“Market dilution” suggests that “using copyrighted books to train an LLM might harm the market for those works because it enables the rapid generation of countless works that compete with the originals, even if those works aren’t themselves infringing.”