AI giants hit with new lawsuits over theft

Six authors filed new copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity AI. The lawsuits state that these companies copied their books from pirate libraries to train their LLMs without permission.

As reported in Publishers Weekly, John Carreyrou (Bad Blood), Lisa Barretta (Conscious Ink), Philip Shishkin (Restless Valley), Jane Adams (When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us), Matthew Sacks (Pro Website Development and Operations), and Michael Kochin (Five Chapters on Rhetoric) opted out of the US$1.5 billion lawsuit against Anthropic, because the US$3,000 they would each receive was too paltry a sum for “willfully infringed work,” given the billions the AI systems that benefited from the theft are worth.

Publishers Weekly also revealed that the filing is not a class action lawsuit, even if the filing is collective, with each author is seeking their own jury trials over the copyright infringement.

(Via Publishers Weekly)

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