Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman (born 1959) spent two decades as a Baltimore Sun reporter before turning her city into the territory of the Tess Monaghan private-eye series, beginning with Baltimore Blues (1997). She has won virtually every major crime-writing prize — Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, Shamus — and her standalone Lady in the Lake became a 2024 Apple TV+ series starring Natalie Portman.

From the Books3 revelation to federal court

Lippman’s novels were among the thousands revealed in 2023 to sit inside Books3 and other pirated datasets used to train large language models. In December 2023 she joined Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and fellow authors as a named plaintiff in Kadrey v. Meta, alleging the company torrented millions of pirated books from shadow libraries to train Llama — ending its own licensing negotiations once it decided, as the complaint puts it, that piracy was cheaper, and escalating the call to Mark Zuckerberg.

In June 2025 Judge Vince Chhabria granted Meta summary judgment against the thirteen authors while emphasizing the ruling “does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful” — it faulted the plaintiffs’ evidence of market harm, not the principle. Lippman has otherwise kept her public focus on her books; the lawsuit, like a byline, is where her position is on the record.