Batman – Dark Knight Robbery Scene
AI startup humanity has agreed to pay US$1.5 billion to resolve claims by authors, including many Australians, and downloaded pirated versions to train the brains of that machine.
This follows a U.S. District Court ruling that found content owned by others to be “fair use” under US law.
However, in the first major case of copyright and generative artificial intelligence, we found that not paying for books to feed AI is theft.
Some reports estimate that the authors could earn around US$3,000 for each book subject to a settlement that humanity sought to approve from District Judge William Alsup.
Content owners, including major media players such as News Corp (which already deals with AI companies), want to be compensated for helping AI companies become a multitude of billionaires.
Now, humanity has filed a proposal to the court to settle claims to resolve the claims of downloading millions of books from Pirate Sources Library Genesis (Libgen) and Pilimi, the largest US copyright settlement in history.
The author guild, who filed the court case, said the amount of awards sent to all AI companies to download illegal copies to train AI to download illegal copies of AI is a huge expense.
“This historic settlement is an important step in acknowledging that AI companies cannot steal the creative work of authors to build AI simply because they need books to develop quality LLM.”
“It's truly shocking that humanity and other major LLM owners have engaged in crime-level copyright infringement schemes to deliberately torrent millions of books from infamous foreign e-book piracy sites that the publishing industry has been actively trying to abolish for years.
“Imagine anger when humans and others illegally suck up electricity to build AI.
“These very rich companies stole from people who earned a median income of just $20,000 a year, worth billions of dollars.
“This settlement sends a clear message that AI companies must pay for the books they use, just as they pay for other important components of LLM.
“This settlement sets an anchor that it is not okay. We expect the settlement to lead to a license that provides the author with both compensation and control over the use of work by AI companies, as in a functioning free market society.”
Humanity closed its $13 billion funding round last week, valued at US$183 billion.
(Disclosure: Chris Pash is a former director and chair of the Australian Authors Association and a former board director of the Copyright Bureau.)
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