FEDERAL COURTHOUSE, July 20 – In re Mosaic
LLM Litigation, the consolidated copyright case brought by
five authors — Stewart O'Nan, Abdi Nazemian, Brian Keene,
Rebecca Makkai, and Jason Reynolds — against Databricks,
Inc. and its Mosaic ML subsidiary over the training of the
MPT and DBRX large language models on their books, has
reached summary judgment before Judge Charles R. Breyer
(yes, brother of the former Supreme Court Justice).
It has also become a small convention of
sealing disputes.
The docket shows at least four separate
fights over what the public may see, each proceeding under
the Northern District's Rule 79-5(f), which lets a party
designate another party's — or a non-party's — material
confidential and forces that designator to justify it.
Non-party HarperCollins Publishers has material at issue.
So does non-party John Wiley & Sons.
So, strikingly, does Meta Platforms — not a party to this
lawsuit at all, but with a declaration filed July 15 by
Meta counsel Elizabeth Stameshkin defending the
confidentiality of an exhibit that surfaced somewhere in
discovery between authors, Databricks, and Mosaic. What
Meta's material actually says, and why it turned up in a
suit about a different company's training data, is exactly
the kind of question a sealed record forecloses.
The pattern by now is familiar to
readers of this series: designators get more time than
usual, by stipulation, to justify their sealing requests,
and the actual particularized showing Ninth Circuit law
requires — specific documents, specific harm, no
hypothesis or conjecture — rarely seems to precede the
extension itself.
Inner City Press has moved to intervene,
asking Judge Breyer to require HarperCollins, Wiley, and
Meta each to make that showing document by document rather
than blanket, and to unseal what they cannot justify.
Let's see what is done on the request, compared to others.
Summary judgment materials, under binding
Ninth Circuit law, get the presumption of access at its
strongest — because they may decide the case, and here,
they may decide how the age of AI treats the authors whose
books built it. Watch this site.
