Why I’m Suing Grammarly; The New York Times, March 13, 2026

Julia Angwin, The New York Times ; Why I’m Suing Grammarly

"Like all writers, I live by my wits. My ability to earn a living rests on my ability to craft a phrase, to synthesize an idea, to make readers care about people and places they can only access through words on a page. Grammarly hadn’t checked with me before using my name. I only learned that an A.I. company was selling a deepfake of my mind from an article online.

And it wasn’t just me. Superhuman — the parent company of Grammarly — made fake editor versions of a range of people, including the novelist Stephen King, the late feminist author bell hooks, the former Microsoft chief privacy officer Julie Brill, the University of Virginia data science professor Mar Hicks and the journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher.

At this point in a story about A.I. exploitation, I would normally bemoan the need for new laws to tackle the novel harms of a new technology. But in this case, there is an old law that’s able to do the job.

In my home state of New York, the century-old right of publicity law prohibits a person’s name or image from being used for commercial purposes without her consent. At least 25 states have similar publicity statutes. And now, I’m using this law to fight back. I am the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Superhuman in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that it violated New York and California publicity laws by not seeking consent before using our names in a paid service...

In this global crisis of consent, we must grab hold of the few anchors we have for enforcement. The right of publicity is one of them, but it needs to be strengthened into a federal law — not just a patchwork of state laws. In some states, it applies only to advertising; in others, to all types of commercial uses. In some, it only covers celebrities; in others, it applies to everyone...

Denmark has taken a novel approach: proposing an amendment to copyright laws that would allow people to copyright their bodies, facial features and voices to protect against A.I. deepfakes. I’d be happy to copyright myself — as copyright seems to be the only law that is regularly enforced on the internet these days...

What Grammarly made wasn’t a doppelgänger. As the writer Ingrid Burrington wrote on Bluesky, it was a sloppelgänger — A.I. slop masquerading as a person.

And it must be stopped."

Henrietta Lacks’s Family Settles Suit With Novartis Over Use of Her Cells; The New York Times, February 27, 2026

 Michael Levenson , The New York Times; Henrietta Lacks’s Family Settles Suit With Novartis Over Use of Her Cells

"The pharmaceutical giant Novartis has reached a settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken from her without her consent in 1951, when she was dying of cervical cancer in a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Ms. Lacks’s cells were the first to reproduce in a laboratory, outside the human body, and have been used in groundbreaking research, including to develop vaccines for polio and Covid-19 and treatments for cancer, Parkinson’s and the flu. The National Institutes of Health found the use of her cells, which were known as HeLa cells, was cited more than 110,000 times in scientific publications between 1953 and 2018.

In August 2024, more than 70 years after Ms. Lacks died at age 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave, her family filed a federal lawsuit in Maryland that accused Novartis, which is based in Switzerland, of amassing substantial profits through the use of the HeLa cell line."

Photographer Sues Church Over Copyright Infringement; Fstoppers, December 28, 2023

  Alex Cooke, Fstoppers; Photographer Sues Church Over Copyright Infringement

"A photographer is taking legal action against a small church in South Carolina for allegedly using his photograph without consent.

Erin Paul Donovan, a photographer from New Hampshire, has initiated a federal lawsuit against Wightman United Methodist Church in Prosperity, South Carolina. Donovan claims that his photograph, depicting New Hampshire’s White Mountains, was used on the church's website without his permission, specifically as a thumbnail for a sermon video dated June 2021...

The suit further alleges that the church not only used the image without authorization but also removed Donovan's copyright notice, name, and watermark from the photograph as it originally appeared on his website."