The Association of American Publishers hosted its 2026 Annual Meeting on May 7 with a 90-minute virtual program that featured talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and presidential biographer Jon Meacham and Stanford University copyright scholar and author Paul Goldstein.

By Andrew Richard Albanese, Editor-in-Chief

The Association of American Publishers hosted its annual meeting on May 7, with a program that used the 250th birthday of the United States to celebrate the central role of publishing and copyright in the nation’s history.

The 90-minute virtual program featured Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and presidential biographer Jon Meacham, in conversation with his editor, Andy Ward, Executive Vice President and Publisher at Random House, and Stanford University copyright scholar and author Paul Goldstein, who joined AAP president and CEO Maria Pallante, for a conversation about copyright law on the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Copyright Act.

‘Authenticity’

To open the meeting, Pallante quickly ran down some of the copyright headlines in the publishing sector, including the historic $1.5 billion dollar settlement pending against Anthropic over its assembling a massive research library of books ripped from pirate sites; a recent lawsuit by 13 AAP member against notorious pirate site Anna’s Archive; and, most recently, a class action suit filed earlier this month by five AAP members (Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill) and bestselling author Scott Turow, against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, which alleges “industrial scale” infringement in the training of Meta’s Llama AI service, and significant market harm from the outputs of Llama, which, the publishers say, is poised to flood the market with AI-generated works.

Making a little bit of news, Pallante told members that—as expected—Anna’s Archive did not respond to the publishers’ lawsuit, leading the publishers moving the court last week for a default judgment—which they are almost certain to get, even if they are unlikely to ever collect on the judgment. In a similar case, a federal judge in April granted Spotify’s motion for a default judgment against Anna’s Archive after the pirate site refused to respond to that lawsuit, ordering some $322 million in damages. “If the judge grants our motion, we will use this order in every way we can to disrupt and frustrate [Anna’s Archive’s] business dealings,” Pallante said, and using the case to highlight the AAP’s call for stronger site blocking tools in the U.S.

“Pirates like this are located outside the jurisdiction of the US, often in hostile territories, making it timely to revisit laws that would block them from so brazingly targeting Americans and doing business here,” Pallante said, “especially now that they are having a bit of a notorious renaissance supplying AI developers in Silicon Valley.”

Pallante also thanked the plaintiff publishers in the Meta case—the first lawsuit filed by major publishers in the AI infringement space. The litigation will tell “a clear and powerful story about Meta’s reckless actions, and the growing trail of market harm in its path, including a flood of generative AI outputs that now compete with and threaten the very works that meta copied,” Pallante said. “Meta has said that its product is transformative and therefore fair use. But fair use is an equitable doctrine, and there is nothing equitable about what meta has done.”

Later in the event, Pallante and Goldtstein acknowledged the legal skirmishes that have characterized the dawn of the AI age, with Goldstein suggesting that legal settlements and a sophisticated licensing market will likely set the contours of AI’s future. While he acknowledged that fair use would play a role in the outcome of the more than 100 lawsuits currently underway between content owners and AI developers, he sounded optimistic that the important role of publishers in the marketplace of ideas will ultimately lead to solutions to the current controversies over AI training and the threat of “AI slop” diluting the market for creative works.

“The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year went to a book that could never have been created by AI,” Goldstein told attendees. “This is what publishing does, and it’s just a wonderful thing. But publishers need to be in that business, and they can stay in that business because people, however degraded the popular culture becomes, want authenticity. That is the strongest, most compelling desire that humans have in the world of culture and science, and only a publisher can guarantee authenticity.”

‘Ripples of Hope’

In a fascinating and entertaining talk, Meacham drew on his latest book, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union to reflect on the central role of the freedom of expression—and a vibrant publishing industry—in American democracy.

“I would argue that the American Revolution was the fullest political manifestation of what had really been unfolding since Gutenberg,” Meacham told attendees. “What the American founders understood was that if you had the capacity to make a case to a broader public, you had the capacity to, therefore, check and balance, a phrase that would later come into the constitutional conversation but was really very much part of the pre-Constitution era, to check and balance established power. And it’s still true, right? Words still matter. Arguments still matter. They’re not necessarily dispositive on their own, but nothing can happen without them.”

Asked by Ward to talk about what it means these days to “uphold the principles of a free and independent press,” Meacham got philosophical, warning that the discussion was as “geeky” as it gets.

“America is fundamentally a test, an unfolding hourly experiment about whether John Locke or Thomas Hobbes was right,” Meacham explained, drawing the distinction between John Locke, “who believed that the natural state of humankind was to be civil with each other,” and Thomas Hobbes, who believed that “the natural state of mankind was, as he put it, the war of all against all.”

“Democracy depends on the capacity to both win graciously and lose graciously. I leave it to you about how well we’re doing with that, but that’s the story we have to tell,” Meacham said, calling a free press “the oxygen of self-government.”

Meacham emphasized that in American democracy, our outcomes are always choices—and often close ones.

“I’m not a believer that just because things have worked out in the past, they’re going to work out again. But I do [understand] that we have had hours of illiberalism in the past.  We have had hours of censorship. We have had people who have used the same means that we use for what we think of as good for ill. And that’s their right. That’s what we’re supposed to do. This is supposed to be a contest of ideas. I think just enough of us can decide anew that the winning graciously and the losing graciously makes sense. And I think the way to make that happen, the way to encourage that choice, is to make the argument, and, more importantly, to tell the story.”

Meacham, offered examples of “the story” of America, including the McCarthyism of the 1950s, and the civil rights movement. “The story is, do you want to be the guy with John Lewis on the Pettis bridge?” he said, referring to the late Congressman and civil rights leader. “Or do you want to be at the foot of the bridge with the state troopers?”

Meacham closed with a note of optimism, and thanked attendees for their work in telling America’s story truthfully and faithfully.

“It’s a scary time,” Meacham conceded, observing that books are things that take the most time while our politics today are often shaped “by the thing that takes the least time,” such as social media posts. Furthermore, another “unusual feature of the moment,” that “does not have a direct analogy in American history” is the pressure being applied “from the highest levels” to “suppress and punish ideas, arguments, people who speak up against the prevailing order. And so, this is a test of elemental courage,” Meacham acknowledged, “and it’s really hard.”

Meacham said his “source of hope”—which he stressed is different that optimism—is that the majority of Americans do not support the suppression of ideas and opinions.

“I’m hopeful because the best, our finest hours, have been ones in which we have just barely won. Our better angels have just barely pulled it out,” he pointed out, reminding attendees that while it has been 250 years since the nation’s founding, America was not a “multiracial, multiethnic democracy in a constitutional sense, functionally until 1965,” which, he added was like “20 minutes ago” in historical terms.

“So, let’s not act as though there was some magical once upon a time, and that we have fallen short of it. Let’s remember that it takes an enormous number, an innumerable number of individual acts of courage and self-sacrifice to create that more perfect union,” Meacham concluded. “It’s what Robert Kennedy called the ripples of hope.”