Technology Giant Apple was accused by the author in a lawsuit Friday (September 5) of illegally using copyrighted books to train copyrighted books, part of the growing legal struggle over intellectual property protection in the age of AI.
The proposed class action lawsuit filed in federal court in Northern California stated that Apple copied the protected work without consent and without credit or compensation.
“Apple is not trying to pay these authors for their contributions to this potentially advantageous venture,” according to a lawsuit filed by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson.
Apple and the plaintiff's attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
The lawsuit is the latest in a wave of cases such as authors, news outlets, and other authors accusing major tech companies of violating legal protections for their works.
Artificial intelligence startup Humanity on Friday revealed in a court filing in California that it agreed to pay US$1.5 billion to resolve class action lawsuits from a group of writers who accused them of using books to train AI chatbot Claude without permission.
Humanity has not acknowledged responsibility for the agreement that plaintiffs' lawyers call the largest publicly reported copyright restoration in history.
In June, Microsoft was hit by a group of authors who allegedly used the company without permission to train a Megatron artificial intelligence model. Meta Platform and Microsoft Assistance Openai also face allegations of misuse of copyrighted material in AI training.
The lawsuit against Apple accused them of using known pirated books to train a large-scale language model of “Openelm.”
According to the lawsuit, Hendrix, who lives in New York and Roberson of Arizona, said their work was part of a pirated data set.
