May 9, 2025 (press release) –
Leading Experts on Artificial Intelligence Discuss Unprecedented Landscape and Litigation
On Thursday, May 8, the Association of American Publishers hosted its 2025 annual meeting, celebrating 55 years of advocacy for the organization. The program stressed the foundational role of publishing in educating, informing, and inspiring people, as well as the urgent need to fight high stakes battles from Big Tech that would eviscerate basic principles of copyright law and weaken national security and U.S. intellectual property interests worldwide.
Keynote Address
A charismatic keynote was delivered by Jenna Bush Hager, who is the co-host of TODAY with Jenna & Friends and the founder of the wildly popular Read with Jenna book club. Since launching the club in 2019, Ms. Bush Hager has selected 78 titles—a remarkable 49 of them have become New York Times bestsellers. This year, Ms. Bush Hager launched Thousand Voices Books, a publishing co-venture with the Random House Publishing Group. She has written ten books herself and is a #1 New York Times bestselling author.
Ms. Bush Hager was featured in conversation with Sanyu Dillon, who is President of the Random House Publishing Group. Together, they spoke of what it means to launch an innovative publishing venture, highlight new and exciting authors, work with independent bookstores throughout the country, and support libraries.
Describing her earliest memories of reading as a child, Ms. Bush Hager cited the influences of her mother and grandmothers. “I think it’s in my DNA,” she said. “And it’s my favorite thing. I’m obsessed with reading. I love it, it keeps me company. It teaches me about perspectives that are different than mine.”
Books are for everyone, she stressed. “Before I worked at the TODAY Show, I was a teacher. I taught third grade in inner-city DC and then I was a sixth-grade English teacher in West Baltimore. And, you know, my kids needed to see themselves in the books that they read because they needed to know what was possible for them.”
Brian Murray, AAP Board Chair and President and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers, and Maria A. Pallante, AAP President and CEO, each delivered impassioned reports on policy threats and resilience.
Mr. Murray said, “According to the 2024 Copyright Industries in the US Economy report, the value added by the total copyright industries to GDP exceeded $3.3 trillion, accounting for 12.31% of the U.S. economy. Along the way, the total copyright industries employed over 21.1 million people in 2023, accounting for 11% of all private employment in the United States.
“And yet, on April 11, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, tweeted out to his 7 million followers four chilling words: ‘Delete all IP law.’ Elon Musk, X’s current owner, responded, ‘I agree.’ We must acknowledge that we are in an unprecedented legal battle with Big Tech not only for the future of content and Intellectual Property in this country, but also for our foundational and fundamental rights as citizens of the United States.”
Speaking of the brazen posture of Big Tech over several decades, he asked, “Do you know what makes American AI models so good? It is not the chips or the code, but the high-quality professional content Big Tech stole from sites like LibGen to train those models. Crawling X and Reddit and the rest of the public web will impart little intelligence on any model. We know that, they know that. That’s why they decided to steal countless works of literature and art to train their AI, and that is the very practice that needs to be stopped.”
The Chair ended on a hopeful note, saying, “Can there continue to be a symbiotic relationship between Big Tech and publishers, the safeguards of human creation? Yes. High quality, human generated content is an essential raw material for high-quality, world leading AI. And it is a resource that America should have a natural advantage in, including compared to rival nations that notoriously do not respect copyright. But in order for that to occur, the fundamental and foundational protection of copyright must be respected absolutely.”
Ms. Pallante shared a glimpse of the broader policy landscape before turning to AI policy debates. “The state of publishing is strong—last year we achieved annual revenue of some $30b in the United States alone. But we have many issues to navigate: From tariffs and supply chain disruption to First Amendment challenges, to reduced funding for research and innovation, to the proliferation of piracy.
“Yet none of these issues approach the sea change to policy debates that is artificial intelligence. As we know, there are many upsides to AI, especially generative AI, from efficiencies and speed to medicine and education. And it is suddenly ubiquitous.
“We might say AI is in everything everywhere all at once.
“But at AAP our concern is fairness and a functioning copyright system. And there’s an inclination to say, ‘We’ve been here before.’ But that’s not true. Yes, there are echoes of prior copyright debates between copyright owners and copyright users, but the stakes are much greater now because copyright is the substructure of publishing.
“Relatedly and globally, we have to be concerned about veracity in AI outputs. The publishing industry has always been an antidote to misinformation, but with the borderless power of AI, the threats are more dangerous. They call publishers to engage on questions of how and where AI is developed and trained, and what it generates, which are not only legal questions but also business strategies.”
Speaking to the industry’s longstanding role in promoting the history and influence of the United States, Ms. Pallante said President Trump’s AI Action Plan, expected in July, will influence the global framework for AI policy. “We are hopeful,” she said. “The United States has proven time and again that intellectual property and technology are symbiotic superpowers.”
Regrettably, she explained, big tech companies are arguing that “copying and exploiting protected authorship should be fair use because forcing them to license is a competitive disadvantage and a threat to national security.” But “national security belongs to the nation state not the corporate state,” she said.
“Of course, we understand that American AI companies must move rapidly to remain competitive over autocrats. But sacrificing the long-established principles of copyright in the process serves Big Tech, not the public. Weakening IP would be a misguided move for a short-term advantage, and it would introduce the greater danger of a tech sector capable of decimating other sectors, like publishing, that are critical partners to the government on security, safety, and public progress.”
“The public interest is what we do best,” she told the audience.
Distinguished Public Service Award
This year, AAP’s Distinguished Public Service Award, which honors “individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the public good by advancing laws or policies that respect the value, creation and publication of original works of authorship,” was presented to Senator Chris Coons of Delaware.
Senator Coons serves on the Senate Appropriations, Judiciary, Foreign Relations, Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and Ethics Committees. He is the Vice-Chair of the Ethics Committee and the senior Democrat on two subcommittees, including the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. He previously served as Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Intellectual Property Subcommittee.
Known for his bipartisan engagement, Senator Coons has been a respected advocate for creativity, innovation, research, and development, and a leader on copyright throughout his career. He believes passionately that intellectual property is an important way to export American values, culture, and democracy around the world.
In his gracious acceptance of the award, the Senator thanked AAP for being “on the frontline,” and highlighted the immense value of all published works, mentioning textbooks and educational materials, research journals, and fiction and nonfiction books. “All of these require strong copyright protections, which are currently under attack. In the age of generative AI, we need to be more attentive—not less—to the importance of copyright.”
He added that “The courts are working on this, but Congress also needs to act.”
Hot Topics in Artificial Intelligence
The meeting featured a discussion with three AI experts: Jeremy Kahn, author of Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future (Simon & Schuster, 2024) and award-winning journalist for Fortune Magazine; Professor Jonathan Barnett, University of Southern California, Gould School of Law and author of The Big Steal: Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property (OUP, 2024); and litigator Maxwell V. Pritt, Partner, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, and interim lead counsel for Kadrey v. Meta as well as other infringement cases against other AI developers. Lui Simpson, AAP Executive Vice President, Global Policy, and Terry Hart, AAP General Counsel, moderated.
Mr. Kahn spoke to the potential positive impact of AI, discussing examples from his book, and noting there are a lot of areas where there is cause for optimism about the impact that AI is going to have. “One of the areas I’m most optimistic about is the use of AI in education,” he said. “But I should caveat that right away by saying as with anything where you’re using technology, there’s sort of there’s good and bad, uh that’s going to come out of this, and we do have to be deliberate about this.”
He suggested that regulation would be helpful to business innovation and adoption of AI technologies by industries, commenting, “I think there’s this sort of myth out there that regulation and innovation are enemies, that they’re sort of opposites of one another. Actually, I think in many areas, having regulation would actually help speed innovation. I think companies are actually crying out for regulation in many cases, because they want to know what the playing field is, they want to know what the ground rules are.”
Professor Barnett described the long effort by big tech companies to weaken IP, including through fair use litigation, with the goal of reducing the cost of content for use in their own businesses. Nevertheless, he said AI may be different from prior battles because the public opinion has shifted. “I think if the courts return fair use to a more modest scope, property rights will be clearer and then what you will see happening, and actually we already see some emergent developments like this, you will see the market developing licensing solutions, contractual solutions, technological solutions. Markets are fantastic at coming up with these solutions. We just need to get the property rights clear again.”
Mr. Pritt described what’s at stake for the creative sectors when it comes to the unprecedented scale of infringement reflected in more than 40 AI cases in the United States. In discussing the use of pirated copies for AI training, he referenced the blog of Anna’s Archive, the largest of the notorious pirate sites, which described how shadow libraries were almost dead, but AI companies have given them new life.
Mr. Pritt slammed the notion that bad faith isn’t relevant. “This is not about fair use in my mind. The Supreme Court—since Justice Story early on when fair use became an equitable doctrine—has said that fair use presupposes good faith and fair dealing. There is no court that has ever suggested that you can illegally acquire copyrighted works and then there’s some sort of fair use defense based on that.”
AAP extends a thank you to the sponsors of the event, Bowker; Davis Wright Tremaine LLP; Industry Insights; and Total Compensation Solutions.
AAP | The Association of American Publishers represents the leading book, journal, and education publishers in the United States on matters of law and policy, advocating for outcomes that incentivize and protect works of authorship and the creative, intellectual, and financial investments that make them possible. As essential participants in local markets and the global economy, our members invest in and inspire the exchange of ideas, transforming the world we live in one word at a time. Find us online at www.publishers.org or on Twitter and Instagram at @AmericanPublish.
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