Lawsuits
They happen. Whether you're on the giving or receiving end, it helps to know how they work.
Everyone makes mistakes. Some are big enough to attract the attention of law enforcement — or a plaintiff's attorney. Your brain may produce a sentence or six that you simply don't remember reading years ago, and you write that sentence down as your own. You may say the wrong thing in an interview or chatroom and defame someone. You may invent a symbol for your company without thoroughly checking whether it was trademarked first. You may write a story that flowed from your brain like water, never realizing you'd read the same story as a child and forgotten you had.
Most legal mistakes involving writers fall into one of five categories:
Defamation / Slander / Libel
Copyright infringement
Right of Publicity violation
Breach of contract
Trademark infringement
Two newer categories — both arising from AI — are covered later in this article, since they didn't exist when these five were first written down.
Part One: When Your Company Is Being Sued
Regardless of what you did or what someone is claiming you did, there's a right way and a wrong way to respond to a lawsuit. Here's the order to do things in:
Say nothing, to anyone.
Take the complaint seriously.
Do not ignore the complaint.
Do not attempt to represent your company yourself.
Contact a litigation attorney.
With your attorney, contact your insurance company.
⚠ It's important to remember that the goal of your attorney and the goal of your insurance company are different. Your attorney's mission is to fight the lawsuit in a manner that best defends you and your company. The insurance company's mission is to exit the lawsuit with as little cost as possible. The two goals may or may not be mutually inclusive.
How Being Served Actually Works
Someone usually shows up at your home or place of business and serves you with a complaint. The usual reaction — anxiety, fear, or anger — is not one you should express in the moment. This person is a process server and has zero knowledge of the complaint's contents. They're merely the deliveryman. Questioning them is a waste of time. Take the paperwork, acknowledge you've been served, and send them on their way. The information you need is in the paperwork itself.
The complaint will have both a Summons and the Complaint itself. The Summons states that you must respond, usually within twenty or twenty-three days. The Complaint outlines the allegations against you and/or your company — and possibly other entities — and will claim the plaintiff has sustained some form of harm: breach of contract, property damage, copyright infringement, piracy, or any number of things. Whatever is alleged, the plaintiff will be seeking relief, usually monetary damages, with the dollar amount typically found at the end of the Complaint.
The Default Judgment Trap
At this point, you may realize the lawsuit is bogus or has been filed merely to harass you. This does not make the complaint any less serious. Do not ignore it, and do not try to represent your company yourself — doing either results in a default judgment.
Once a Complaint is on file, ignoring the problem is a fool's errand. The dispute will not blow over simply because you refuse to engage. Each state has its own Trial Rules, most containing strict deadlines for responding and dictating the form of a response. Failure to respond timely and correctly can and will lead to a default judgment — the court has no choice but to rule for the plaintiff and award them the judgment against you and/or your company. In short, failure to act on your part guarantees a win for the person who sued you.
⚠ A default judgment, even one based on a bogus complaint, is still enforceable. Once it's ruled on, it may be too late — even with a lawyer's help — to undo the judgment, get the complaint back before the court, and successfully argue the plaintiff's claims lack merit. With a default judgment in hand, a plaintiff can foreclose on real estate owned by your company, freeze your company bank accounts, take possession of your vehicles, and even collect your company's profits — actions that can stop your business from operating until the judgment is paid in full.
Ignoring a Lawsuit Is Not an Option
Receiving this notice requires action — but well thought-out action, not anything detrimental to your case. Don't lash out emotionally by firing off a nasty email to the person suing you, and don't attempt to erase any evidence of the complaint from the internet or other records. Stay calm and proceed carefully.
The first thing you should do is call your attorney. Send them a copy of the complaint and be prepared to receive instructions on what to do next. Most likely, they'll tell you to gather and safeguard any evidence involving the complaint — everything related to it, no matter how remote it may seem, including the names and contact information of any witnesses. Your attorney will guide you on what to include. Once you have everything collected, make two copies of it all and schedule a meeting with your lawyer.
Once you and your lawyer have gone over everything, you'll need to decide on a course of action: fight the complaint, move to dismiss it, or settle. If there's a chance the complaint has merit, the next call is to your insurance company, to determine your coverage and how they wish to proceed. If your company has a policy covering this type of claim, your insurance company should hire an attorney to represent and defend it. If not, you'll need to retain your own lawyer.
At this point you'll start seeing estimated fees added to the monetary damages at stake. If the case feels shaky, or you feel it's without merit and easily defended, you may feel you can handle the defense yourself and save money.
Do Not Attempt to Represent Your Company Yourself
Chances are, you can't anyway. Even if you were adamant that you could handle it, the court will not allow it.
Most states have trial rules that prohibit individuals who are not attorneys from appearing in court and representing a corporation or LLC. While these laws provide a narrow exception for small claims matters involving less than $1,500, this exception is unlikely to apply to your case. Attempting to represent your company in court constitutes the unauthorized practice of law.
The main rationale: the court considers corporations and LLCs separate legal entities that cannot speak for themselves. A corporation must be represented by a licensed attorney. This makes sense when you consider that a corporation can have thousands of shareholders or members, each with an interest in the outcome — an unlicensed person cannot adequately represent all of those interests. Even in a single-member LLC, the same rules apply.
Even if you are a lawyer yourself, think twice before self-representing. Representing yourself in legal proceedings — even when trained to do so — can lead to poor decisions driven by emotional investment. The old saying "a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client" exists for a reason.
The best advice is simple: follow the instructions of your lawyer. It's what they do.
New Lawsuit Categories in the AI Era
The five categories listed at the start of this article were established long before AI became a significant factor in indie publishing. Two newer categories — and one important update — are worth knowing about.
AI Copyright Class Actions
Multiple class action lawsuits have been filed against AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Stability AI, and others — alleging that training AI models on copyrighted books without authorization constitutes infringement.
The most significant of these, Bartz v. Anthropic, reached a $1.5 billion settlement — agreed in September 2025, and described as the largest copyright settlement in US history. The settlement covers roughly 500,000 works, sourced from shadow libraries including Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror, at a compensation rate of approximately $3,000 per qualifying work.
⚠ As of this writing, the timeline on this settlement has moved past the action stage for most authors: the claim filing deadline (March 30, 2026) and the opt-out deadline (early February 2026) have both passed. If you filed a claim, you're in the class and awaiting distribution — the fairness hearing was moved to May 14, 2026, with distributions expected to be calculated shortly after. If you didn't file a claim and didn't opt out, you're bound by the settlement's terms as a class member but cannot receive payment from it, and cannot separately sue Anthropic for the same conduct. If you opted out, you preserved the right to sue independently but forfeited any share of the fund. Other cases against other AI companies remain ongoing — monitor the Authors Guild (authorsguild.org) for updates on those.
Review Manipulation and Platform Policy Violations
Authors have faced legal action — and far more commonly, platform enforcement actions — related to coordinated review schemes, review trading, and purchased reviews. While these typically result in platform account actions rather than lawsuits, when a platform like Amazon takes action against an author for alleged review manipulation, the author may face civil claims if revenue disputes arise. This is a relatively new category of publishing-adjacent legal risk that didn't exist a decade ago.
Defamation and AI-Generated Content
Authors who publish AI-generated content that defames real people — even unintentionally, if the AI model reproduces false statements from its training data — face the same defamation liability as if they'd written the content themselves. "The AI wrote it" is not a legal defense. Authors are responsible for the content they publish regardless of what tools generated it. This makes careful editorial review of AI-generated content not just a quality issue, but a legal one — see Editing for Indie Authors for the broader discussion of AI tools in your editing process.
Part Two: When You Need to File — Protecting Your Own Copyright
Knowing how to file a complaint is just as important as knowing how to defend against one.
The most common legal issue writers deal with is someone using their content without permission. Some people still believe that if something is on the internet, it's free to use however they wish. People may like your blog post and copy it to their own. They may use a video you made, or your book's cover art, to promote their own writing or product. They may even download and share your entire book. This is copyright infringement, and it's illegal.
Your First Defense: Ample Warning
There are several ways to put potential infringers on notice before anything happens:
Place a copyright notice on each page of your website, at the bottom of every blog entry, on every newsletter, and at the end of every video — formatted as: Copyright (or the © symbol) + Date + Name of the Copyright Owner + ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Tip: to insert the © symbol, press Ctrl+Alt+C on Windows, or hold Option and press G on a Mac.)
Post a copyright policy on your webpage — something like: "If you wish to use this blog for your own purposes, you may copy no more than 50 words without permission, provided you give attribution to the original post, link back to the original content, and do not alter the general meaning or message of the content."
Link back to your own webpages in every blog post you write — this generates "ping backs" through your analytics software, letting you see where your work is being displayed.
Register your blog with the Copyright Office (see The Copyright Page for current registration costs and process).
Set up Google Alerts for your name, your publishing company's name, your blog's signature tagline, and the titles of your posts and newsletters — even for a particular sentence that might be especially tempting to copy. Google will email you whenever those words or phrases appear somewhere.
If your work is especially attractive to pirates, software exists that disables right-clicks, watermarks your work, and embeds code that notifies you when it's used somewhere other than its original location.
When Theft Happens Anyway
Even with all of the above in place, eventually your work will be stolen. When this happens, there's no need to call your lawyer right away — there are a few things you can do yourself first.
Contact the site. In most cases, a simple email to the website's administration is enough to get your content taken down.
Send a take-down notice — often called a DMCA notice.
The DMCA Notice
DMCA stands for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law passed in 1998 intended to update copyright law for electronic commerce and electronic content providers. It criminalizes the circumvention of electronic and digital copyright protection systems.
A DMCA notice is a simple letter outlining the material being used, where it's being used, and demanding that it be removed or disabled. A typical letter reads something like this:
XYZ Publishing LLC, 2000 Hemingway Dr., Big City, Michigan 29746, www.XYZPublishing.com
Captain Jack Piracy Services, 3215 Mom's Basement Rd., Intercourse, Penn 17529, www.thisisnotmine.com
RE: DMCA NOTICE
To Whom It May Concern,
It has been brought to my attention that your website is hosting unlicensed copies of copyrighted works published by XYZ Publishing LLC — particularly the book titled "Making Money with Ebooks," published on May 4th, 2019. [LINK to infringed material]
Without authorization from the copyright holder, the material described is being offered for sale, made available for copying, and made available for download at the following location: [LINK to pirate site]
A thorough check of XYZ Publishing LLC records finds no authorization for use granted to your company by XYZ Publishing LLC. XYZ Publishing does hereby give notice of these activities to you and requests that you immediately remove or disable access to the material described. Please advise as to what actions you have taken to remedy this infringement.
Sincerely, Richard Fitzwell, President, XYZ Publishing LLC
Many social media sites provide a letter template to help facilitate take-down notices — commonly found under Legal, Copyright, Report a Problem, or Help in their site footers.
⚠ If you're dealing with a website, always send a copy to the Internet Service Provider hosting it. You can find this using a WHOIS lookup tool — search "whois lookup" and enter the domain name of the website stealing your work. The ISP may have its own template; if not, you can write your own using the sample above. Once you've sent your take-down notice, also notify Google using Google's Copyright Removal tool (searchable from Google's support pages) — you're requesting that Google remove the infringing site from search results. Google is usually keen to do so; the site may not be removed entirely, but its position in search results will fall considerably, rendering it close to invisible.
Counter-Notifications and What Comes Next
Whether or not these steps work depends on the person pirating your content and their location. They may do nothing, resulting in the social media site, ISP, and search engine removing the pirated material. Or they may file a counter-notification disputing the DMCA notice.
If that happens, the ISP will repost the infringing material, and you'll have 14 business days to file a legal action. This usually results in the material being removed a second time — but if the ISP isn't based in the United States, it may ignore the second notice as well.
At this point, it's time to call a lawyer. But keep a few things in mind first: lawyers and litigation are expensive — the cost alone may exceed what you're losing. The person infringing may be overseas and therefore out of reach. Even if you win, collecting damages in the form of lost sales may be hard to prove.
A letter from your lawyer may be enough to change their minds. A cease-and-desist letter on the firm's letterhead is usually not something people ignore, and your lawyer may be willing to send one for little to no cost.
Before You Accuse Someone
Before pursuing any infringement claim, it helps to remember a few things:
Ideas are not covered by copyright. Neither are themes or historical events. Stories set in similar times or places to yours are not automatically copyright violations. Infringement implies "close copying" — copying word-for-word, or with very similar words expressing the same ideas you've expressed. It does not apply to the idea itself.
Quotes of your work used for commentary, educational purposes, review, or parody will most likely fall under fair use, and are not considered infringement.
Detecting Disguised Piracy
Pirated material isn't always easy to spot. Some sites go a step further to avoid detection by changing the cover and title of the book they've stolen. This is where Google Alerts for a few key phrases from each book becomes valuable — pick a line, preferably from the first twenty pages, that's unique to that work. Few pirates are willing to go to the trouble of rewriting an entire book and will usually copy the contents word-for-word. For them, this is about making money for as long as possible before being caught, then moving to the next target. Most pirate sites are actually fronts for stealing information like email addresses and credit card numbers — profit from your work is just a bonus to them.
The Cost-Benefit Question
With the number of pirate websites steadily growing, trying to keep up with all of them can quickly occupy a large amount of your time. Weigh the actual cost of addressing the theft against the time it takes away from your other pursuits. What is your time worth? Are you better off writing? Usually, the answer is yes.
DRM — Do I Check the Box or Not?
DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and it's offered at many of the platforms you'll publish to — usually just a question and a box to check yes or no. DRM is encryption software that places a lock on your work, allowing only the purchaser to open it. In theory.
While DRM sounds like a no-brainer, it doesn't accomplish much in practice. The software is easily cracked, and for some, a DRM'd book is simply a challenge to crack. Like a cheap lock, it only keeps the honest honest — DRM will barely slow down someone determined to steal a book.
Whether to apply DRM is every author's decision. While it doesn't help much, it also doesn't hurt much. Treat it like the lock on your front door or car — it may not stop a determined thief, but most people use them anyway.
DRM does nothing to protect or take away from your copyright — you retain your copyright whether you use DRM or not.
Obscurity Is the Bigger Threat
"Obscurity is a bigger threat to authors than piracy." — Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, speaking from deep experience in indie publishing. These words have rung true since he said them in 2013.
Most authors give away their work to build an audience. The more people read your books, the more likely they are to recommend them to friends and family — and in advertising, word-of-mouth is still king. The number of free books an author gives away is usually a magnitude greater than the number being pirated. Most authors view piracy as free advertising.
Fighting piracy and patrolling the web to protect your copyrights may or may not be a good use of your time. Chances are, if you and your publishing company ever reach the point where piracy is costing a significant sum, that point is well off into the future.
ScribeCount Author OS — Your Financial Record in Legal Proceedings
If your LLC is involved in a lawsuit that includes claims of financial harm — lost income, disrupted sales, or damages tied to your publishing revenue — the ScribeCount Sales Dashboard provides the platform-sourced financial record that documents your actual income. The Historical view shows your royalty income over time, by platform and by title — the kind of documented financial history that's far more credible in legal proceedings than self-compiled spreadsheets or memory.
If a copyright infringement claim requires you to demonstrate the commercial value of the work that was infringed — how much income it was generating before and after the infringement — ScribeCount's income history data provides exactly that documentation. Maintain your ScribeCount connections and keep your data current. In a lawsuit, your financial records are part of your evidence.
Conclusion
Remember what your time is worth. Yes, keep an eye on your copyrights — but pick your battles too.
Most authors will spend their entire careers never needing a litigation lawyer. This is a combination of luck and preparedness. The better prepared an author is, the lower their chances of being sued. Taking a few steps to safeguard your work, being careful about what you write and say, and periodically checking on your copyrighted works are usually enough to keep you from needing that lawyer.
Lawsuits are an unpleasant reality of running a publishing business. The good news is that they're manageable when handled correctly — and preventable in many cases by running your LLC properly, maintaining your corporate wall (see LLC Operating Agreements for the Indie Author), carrying appropriate insurance, and staying on the right side of copyright, trademark, and contract law.
If you're served: stay calm, say nothing, call your attorney, and take the complaint seriously. The protocol exists because it works. Following it gives your company the best possible chance of a favorable outcome. The alternative — ignoring it, or trying to handle it yourself — guarantees the worst possible outcome. Don't let that happen.
— Randall
