AI

Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage have filed suit against Microsoft, the latest in a series of lawsuits claiming that training OpenAI on authors’ books is copyright infringement. Like other suits, the authors highlight that the company is making billions of dollars on its AI products without any compensation for the authors whose works built them. “Defendants clearly could have obtained the capital to pay given the extraordinary investments already made and the staggering valuations now associated with these LLMs,” the complaint reads. “Defendants also could have explored financing alternatives, such as profit sharing or other mechanisms to facilitate their development […]

As we noted recently, coalitions of authors took the lead in 2023 in trying to hold the leaders in generative AI accountable for stealing vast amounts of copyrighted materials to train their Large Language Models. Now at year’s end, authors gained a powerful ally in court as the New York Times Company filed its own copyright infringement lawsuit in Federal Court in New York’s Southern District against OpenAI and Microsoft. The NYT says comes after lengthy negotiations: “For months, The Times has attempted to reach a negotiated agreement with Defendants, in accordance with its history of working productively with large […]

In an update to their AI copyright infringement case against Meta, plaintiffs Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden allege that, as early as 2020, lawyers for Meta knew there were “legal problems” with using copyrighted books within the dataset to train their AI tool Llama. Kadrey, et al. are now joined by authors Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Díaz, Andrew Sean Greer, David Henry Hwang, Matthew Klam, Laura Lippman, Rachel Louise Snyder, Ayelet Waldman, and Jacqueline Woodson in the class action suit. Llama uses The Pile, a dataset for training large language models that contains Books3, a corpus of […]

Final “reply comments” on the US Copyright Office’s “study of the copyright law and policy issues raised by artificial intelligence systems” are due by the end of day Wednesday. While the office itself has not yet posted any of the replies, the AAP has provided a copy of their comments to the media. The organization states its “forceful opposition to the flawed and inaccurate assertions submitted by some tech companies and/or their investors in the first comment round, in which they position copyright and the protection of creative expression as an obstacle to innovation and progress. This is nonsense. Copyright […]