Amazon has rolled out a feature for Kindle-based ebooks. If you haven’t seen stories on this, you should check out these articles.

The short version: Amazon AI will generate answers to questions about your books. This seems like a neat feature for readers, which is how Amazon pitches it. Unfortunately, there is no incremental payment to authors for this service, no new rights, no increased sales, nothing. At the same time, there are arguments to be made that the Amazon AI is creating a derivative work that may harm the author through loss of revenues, loss of creative control for their intellectual property, and violation of the author’s copyright.

I’m not a lawyer, though I’ve worked with many. I expect this will turn into a class action lawsuit against Amazon. Here me out…

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If I were building a stand-alone solution outside of Amazon, I would be expected to legally obtain a license of the work I wanted this service to run against, so the author would received payment. It could then be argued that this usage fell into a “fair use” doctrine for reporting, summarization, commentary, etc.

However, traditional sales agreements are very particular about what rights an author is selling, and case law states that the author retains any rights not explicitly transferred as part of the sale agreement.

When authors sell through Amazon, authors grant specific rights as part of agreeing to sell through their digital channels. Specifically:

5.5 Grant of Rights. You grant to each Amazon party, throughout the term of this Agreement, a nonexclusive, irrevocable, right and license to print (on-demand and in anticipation of customer demand) and distribute Books, directly and through third-party distributors, in all formats you choose to make available through KDP by all distribution means available. This right includes, without limitation, the right to: (a) reproduce, index and store Books on one or more computer facilities, and reformat, convert and encode Books; (b) display, market, transmit, distribute, sell, license and otherwise make available all or any portion of Books through Amazon Properties (as defined below), for customers and prospective customers to download, access, copy and paste, print, annotate and/or view online and offline, including on portable devices; (c) permit customers to “store” Digital Books that they have purchased from us on servers (“Virtual Storage”) and to access and re-download such Digital Books from Virtual Storage from time to time both during and after the term of this Agreement; (d) display and distribute (i) your trademarks and logos in the form you provide them to us or within Books (with such modifications as are necessary to optimize their viewing), and (ii) portions of Books, in each case solely for the purposes of marketing, soliciting and selling Books and related Amazon offerings; (e) use, reproduce, adapt, modify, and distribute, as we determine appropriate, in our sole discretion, any metadata and product description, information or images that you make available in connection with Books; and (f) transmit, reproduce and otherwise use (or cause the reformatting, transmission, reproduction, and/or other use of) Books as mere technological incidents to and for the limited purpose of technically enabling the foregoing (e.g., caching to enable display). In addition, you agree that we may permit our affiliates and independent contractors, and our affiliates’ independent contractors, to exercise the rights that you grant to us in this Agreement. “Amazon Properties” means any web site, application or online point of presence, on any platform, that is owned or operated by or under license by Amazon or co-branded with Amazon, and any web site, application, device or online point of presence through which any Amazon Properties or products available for sale on them are syndicated, offered, merchandised, advertised or described. You grant us the rights set forth in this Section 5.5 on a worldwide basis; however, if we make available to you a procedure for indicating that you do not have worldwide distribution rights to a Digital Book, then the territory for the sale of that Digital Book will be those territories for which you indicate, through the procedure we provide to you, that you have distribution rights, except as otherwise provided in the Program Policies. 
   

I can imagine Amazon’s stance is the “Ask this Book” feature is covered under right (a) and is supporting customers rights to “annotate” the book, or that the content generated is solely “for the purposes of marketing, soliciting and selling Books and related Amazon offerings”. However, the part of the sentence immediately before this quote is “portions of Books in each case solely”. This is where the lawyers will attack.

The “Ask This Book” feature is essentially a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system for each book. It begins by parsing the complete work into a vector database that can then be used by an AI to retrieve answers and generate content in response to the question the user asks. The problem is usage by such a system is now more than “portions of Book” governed by the rights granted. It’s the full book. It’s use of the book in a manner which the author has not granted the right for. It may well be a copyright violation, worth up to $150,000 in statutory damages, per instance of copyright violation.

If I were a lawyer taking this case, I would argue that every use of the technology by a customer of the book was a violation of copyright by Amazon.

Every book available on Kindle has this potential copyright violation every time the feature is used. Instant class-action status.

The threat of such litigation would have stock price impacts, given the scope of the risk. $150,000 time how many books on Kindle time how many kindle users? The risk alone may force a quick settlement. The risks also mean it will be a long, drawn-out legal fight if it is ever brought. Lawyers should be salivating at the opportunity.

What can authors do?

Author advocacy groups are pushing back already (The Author’s Guild, Writers Beware, and others). Writers should support them. Additionally, expecting this to eventually go to court, and possibly all the way to the Supreme Court, if you are publishing on Amazon, make sure you’ve filed your copyright registration.