AG in Action
August 18, 2026
A big part of the Guild’s advocacy involves speaking on topics related to the business and legal sides of writing. Here’s what Guild staff were up to in July; make sure to check our events page and read our newsletter so you don’t miss the next event. (If you’re a Guild member, you should receive our newsletter automatically.)
On July 16, Guild General Counsel Cheryl Davis and Director of Policy and Advocacy Umair Kazi presented a panel on “Introduction to Copyright and AI” at the Romance Writers of America’s Annual Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They offered a brief introduction to U.S. copyright law and explained how authors’ rights are (or should be) set out in their publishing contracts.
On the copyright side, they emphasized the importance of the definition of “out of print,” as that determination can impact an author’s ongoing right to exploit their intellectual property. In these days of ebooks and print on demand, publishers can simply retain a file for a book and say that it is available via print on demand or ebook and as such is ‘in print.’ If that is true, then the book will never be out of print despite lack of actual sales or the publisher’s doing anything to distribute or sell the book. As specified in our model trade book contract, the definition of ‘out of print’ should not rely on mere potential availability but rather whether the book is available through ordinary retail channels and royalties fall below a certain threshold. Read more about the importance of negotiating and exercising out-of-print clauses here.
They also delved into how AI-generated and AI-assisted content intersect with existing copyright law and discussed some of the proposed legislation the Guild is supporting—such as the AI Labeling Act of 2026 (which requires visible and machine-readable disclosures on AI-generated content), the Protecting Consumers from Deceptive AI Act that directs the creation of standards related to identifying AI generated content, and state-level transparency bills thay would compel AI companies to disclose copyrighted works in their training data. They also referred to sample language to include in publishing contracts such as a provision saying that a publisher has no AI rights under the contract unless expressly stated.
On July 20, General Counsel Cheryl Davis took part in a webinar on scams with Denver chapter co-ambassador and literary manager Kirsten “Kiki” Ringer. They discussed how to recognize and avoid scams, including examples of recent scams targeting authors they’d witnessed, and how scams have expanded and changed over time with increasingly sophisticated technology. Davis also talked about the Guild’s efforts in combatting scams, including working with the FBI on the PageTurner scam and reporting on the increase in number (and sophistication) of impersonation scams.
An evergreen Guild recommendation: Check the email address of the individual reaching out to you; if they use the name of a real agent (or editor or other prominent individual) with “gmail.com” at the end, rather than a company domain name, it’s a red flag and likely an impersonation scam, rather than a genuine solicitation.
On July 30, General Counsel Cheryl Davis took part in a panel at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ 2026 Virtual Summer Conference entitled “What the Industry Really Thinks About Book Banning.” The panel also featured Phil Bildner, middle grade novelist and founder of the Author Village booking agency; Black non-binary author George M. Johnson (All Boys Aren’t Blue); and Namrata Tripathi, founder and publisher of Kokila.
Davis talked about the six current lawsuits against book bans in which the Authors Guild is a plaintiff as well as the potential impact that silencing voices can have on students: “If you limit a child’s ability to see themselves in the books they read, does that make them feel unwelcome in their classroom and that their stories don’t matter?”
