Two professors filed a copyright infringement suit against Apple.
(1) “Susana Martinez-Conde is a Professor of Ophthalmology, Neurology, and Physiology & Pharmacology at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University; and
(2) “Stephen L. Macknik is a Professor of Ophthalmology, Neurology, and Physiology & Pharmacology at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University. Professor Macknik is Professor Martinez-Conde’s writing partner and husband. Together, they authored the international bestselling book Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions, which has been published in 19 languages, distributed worldwide, and is listed as one of the 36 Best Books of 2011 by The Evening Standard, London, and received the Prisma Prize to the best science book of the year.”
The proposed class action is based on Apple’s alleged use of pirated books dataset Books3: “Apple’s GitHub repository confirms “OpenELM was pretrained on public datasets. Specifically, our pre-training dataset contains RefinedWeb, PILE [including Books3], a subset of RedPajama, and a subset of Dolma v1.6.”
“Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works are among the works in the Books3 dataset.”
This lawsuit is very similar to Hendrix v. Apple suit filed in September 2025 (see below). We expect it will be considered a related case.
The Joseph Saveri Law Firm represents the plaintiffs.
The Joseph Saveri Law Firm has now filed 10 copyright lawsuits against AI companies:
- Martinez-Conde v. Apple
- Denial v. OpenAI
- O’Nan v. Databricks, Inc., Mosaic ML
- Nazemian v. NVIDIA Corp.
- Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc.
- Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc.
- Sarah Silverman v. OpenAI, Inc.
- Sarah Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd
- Doe 1 v. Github, Inc.
- Zhang v. Google
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