The copyright cases against AI companies are now coming at a steady pace. We’ve now hit 56 copyright lawsuits against AI companies in the United States—and a total of 82 worldwide.
Another book author, Tasha Alexander (aka Anastasia Grant), the author of the Lady Emily Ashton book series, filed the 3rd copyright suit against Apple for its alleged use of shadow libraries with pirated books. They all allege basically the same thing.
This from Alexander’s complaint: “Prior to October 2023, using the “Books” subset of the RedPajama dataset required copying the Books3 dataset. By using the “Books” subset, and thereby the full text of each book in Books3, Apple copied entire works to train its OpenELM model.
“78. Apple’s OpenELM models were thus trained on Books3, a known collection of
pirated books, which included Plaintiff’s and the Class’s Infringed Works.
“79. Even if Apple deletes Books3 from the dataset used to train OpenELM, its prior
admitted reliance on the dataset makes certain that use of pirated books continues, as Books3 is
already ‘deeply embedded in the very structure of the model’s learned behaviors.’”
One thing different about this suit: it also names Apple execs Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea as defendants.
They are included based on their alleged roles: “23. Defendant Craig Federighi is Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple, oversees Apple’s AI strategy including Apple Intelligence, and resides in Santa Clara County, California. Defendant Federighi was personally involved in the relevant decision making at Apple and directed, approved, or ratified the conduct that has led to widespread infringement.
“24. Defendant John Giannandrea is Apple’s Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy and resides in Santa Clara County, California. Defendant Federighi was personally involved in the relevant decision making at Apple and directed, approved, or ratified the conduct that has led to widespread infringement.”
We should expect that Alexander v. Apple will be deemed related to the other 2 book author suits against Apple, Hendrix and Martinez-Conde, both over which Judge Gonzalez Rogers presides.
Alexander is represented by lawyers from COTCHETT, PITRE & MCCARTHY, LLP and
BLEICHMAR FONTI & AULD LLP.
Meanwhile, Reddit, along with other defendants, was just sued in its 3rd copyright suit in the Southern District of New York This case involves alleged DMCA anti-circumvention violations for data scraping from Reddit posts.
Reddit is represented by lawyers from WOLLMUTH MAHER & DEUTSCH LLP and BARTLIT BECK LLP.
DOWNLOAD COMPLAINT IN ALEXANDER V. APPLE
DOWNLOAD COMPLAINT IN REDDIT V. SERPAPI