Yesterday, six authors filed new individual copyright infringement lawsuits against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity AI. The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California, alleges that the companies copied authors' books from popular pirate libraries such as LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF to train large-scale language models without permission, licenses, or compensation.
This group of authors, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Carreyrou, was among those who did not participate in the $1.5 billion settlement of the lawsuit against Anthropic announced in September. They claim, as has always been the case, that high-quality books are the “gold standard” for training data, and that AI companies are “using copies of them to now build systems worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
These new lawsuits point out that copyright infringement was caused even though Judge William Alsup, who presided over the Anthropic case, found the AI training to be fair use, but they specifically emphasize the use of pirated e-books, which was a factor in Alsup seeking relief and settling, which led to the proposed settlement.
The new filing says the settlement, which provides authors and/or publishers with $3,000, is not enough. The complaint states that the $3,000 amount is “a small portion (only 2%) of the Copyright Act's statutory cap of $150,000 plus attorney's fees for each work knowingly infringed.” In fact, the plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages from each defendant in the amount of $150,000 for each work, and therefore a total of $900,000 for each work.
In addition to the author Carreyrou, Bad Blood: The secrets and lies of Silicon Valley startupsthe other authors in the lawsuit are Lisa Valletta, who has written 11 books on spirituality, tattoos, and mental development; Author Philip Shishkin restless valleya nonfiction work depicting the political turmoil in Central Asia. Jane Addams is a psychologist who has written eight nonfiction books about family relationships and life transitions. IT professional Matthew Sack writes: Development and operation of professional websites;Professor of political science at Tel Aviv University; Five chapters on rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothingness, and Art.
This fall, a website called ClaimsHero was launched with the goal of encouraging authors to opt out of the settlement and join in filing new lawsuits. As it stands, authors have until January 16 to opt out of the proposed Humanity Settlement, which Judge Alsup strongly disagrees with.
At a Nov. 13 hearing, Alsup called ClaimsHero's claims a “massive amount of fraud” and directed the company to change its “misleading” communications. The hearing came after the authors in the lawsuit filed a motion seeking an order blocking ClaimsHero's attempts to induce them to opt out. He then ordered changes to ClaimsHero's website, noting, among other things, that the group had no experience litigating in federal or state court, according to a Bloomberg News report about the hearing.
ClaimsHero describes itself as an Arizona-licensed law firm and consumer justice platform, but it works with two outside law firms, Stris & Maher LLP and Freedman Normand Friedland LLP. Both firms are the ones listed as having filed the lawsuit on Monday.
While talking with P.W. Lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit through an outside PR firm emphasized that the lawsuit is not a class-action lawsuit, and although it is a somewhat unconventional lawsuit, each author is seeking an individual jury trial for their work. They also noted that they had successfully used similar strategies to win settlements. Henry et al. v. Brown University et al.an antitrust lawsuit filed last year against 17 of the top 25 universities for manipulating college tuition prices.
The process of going to court individually to challenge deep-pocketed companies can be expensive, and lawyers cover all costs and legal fees in exchange for a 35% contingency fee.
P.W. Several defendants in the case have not yet responded to requests for comment. Bloomberg reported that it received an email from Elon Musk's AI company xAI that read “Legacy Media Lies.” Bloomberg also spoke with Perplexity's head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, who denied that the AI company indexes books.
As of Tuesday afternoon, no date has been set for a preliminary court hearing.
This story has been updated with additional information and context.
