Apple is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit in California federal court, with two authors alleging the company trained its artificial intelligence system on pirated books. The case, filed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The complaint contends that Apple used its copyrighted works without approval or payment in the development of its AI models. In particular, the filing claims<\/a> Apple relied on Books3, a large dataset containing nearly 200,000 illegally copied titles, to build its OpenELM and Foundation Language Models.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cApple is building part of this new enterprise [Apple Intelligence] using Books3, a dataset of pirated copyrighted books that includes the published works of Plaintiffs and the Class. Apple used Books3 to train its OpenELM language models. Apple also likely trained its Foundation Language Models using this same pirated dataset,\u201d according to the complaint.<\/p>\n The filing further alleges that Applebot, the company\u2019s web crawler, could reach \u201cshadow libraries,\u201d which host large collections of unlicensed digital books.<\/p>\n \u201cApplebot can also reach \u201cshadow libraries\u201d that host millions of other unlicensed copyrighted books, including, on information and belief, Plaintiffs\u2019 and Class Members\u2019 copyrighted works,\u201d the filing read.<\/p>\n Hendrix and Roberson are urging the court to grant class-action status, arguing that many other writers\u2019 works were likely used in a similar manner. They are seeking compensation for damages and an order preventing Apple from further using pirated works in its AI training.<\/p>\n The authors also argue that Apple\u2019s actions have caused economic harm.<\/p>\n \u201cThis conduct has deprived Plaintiffs and the Class of control over their work, undermined the economic value of their labor, and positioned Apple to achieve massive commercial success through unlawful means,\u201d according to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n The case joins a surge of copyright disputes targeting major technology firms over the use of creative works in AI systems. Just last week, Anthropic, the AI firm behind Claude, agreed to pay $1.5 billion<\/a> to settle claims from authors who alleged their books were used without permission to train its models.\u00a0<\/p>\n Other companies, including Microsoft<\/a>, Meta<\/a>, and OpenAI<\/a> are also battling lawsuits over whether feeding copyrighted books into AI training qualifies as fair use or infringes on creators\u2019 rights. Courts have yet to issue definitive rulings on the matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n As of now, Apple has not issued a public comment on the lawsuit. The case is likely to draw significant attention, as it challenges how one of the world\u2019s most valuable companies builds its next generation of AI tools.<\/p>\n The <\/strong>US Copyright Office has weighed in on AI training<\/strong><\/a> and fair use. Its findings could reshape rules for creators and developers.<\/strong><\/p>\n The post Authors Take Apple to Court, Alleging AI Was Built with Pirated Books<\/a> appeared first on eWEEK<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Apple is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit in California federal court, with two authors alleging the company trained its artificial intelligence system on pirated books. The case, filed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson.\u00a0 The complaint contends that Apple used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4731"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cybersecurityinfocus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Authors say they were ignored<\/h2>\n
Part of a broader legal trend<\/h2>\n