Three authors have taken legal action against Anthropic, alleging the AI firm used their copyrighted material without permission to train its Claude AI model. The case, filed in California, accuses the company of basing its operations on the unapproved use of numerous copyrighted books.
Claims of Unauthorized Utilization
Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson contend that Anthropic’s methods are depriving authors of their deserved earnings. According to Reuters, they assert that the AI-generated content from Claude was made possible by training the model on a vast array of books for which they received no payment.
The lawsuit is looking to achieve class action status, aiming to include a larger group of authors who might have faced similar issues. The complaint references a situation from May 2023 involving Tim Boucher, who allegedly used Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate 97 books within a year, pricing them between $1.99 and $5.99 each.
Dispute Over Training Data
Central to the authors’ allegations is the claim that Anthropic used datasets such as The Pile and Books3, purportedly containing illicit book collections like Bibliotik. The lawsuit argues that Anthropic evaded the expenses associated with properly licensing the content, thus breaching U.S. copyright regulations.
The case is part of a broader trend of legal actions against AI companies over their use of copyrighted content for training models. Similar lawsuits have targeted other firms, like OpenAI and Microsoft, with some cases being merged into larger litigations. Anthropic has faced legal scrutiny before: last year, music publishers sued the company, alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted lyrics. The current case brought by the authors adds to the legal challenges Anthropic faces over its data practices.
History of Legal Spats Over AI Training
In May, Eight prominent newspapers owned by investment firm Alden Global Capital initiated legal action against OpenAI and Microsoft. The core of the lawsuit is the allegation that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, have been trained on copyrighted news articles without obtaining permission or offering compensation to the publishers.
The lawsuit follows a similar action taken by the New York Times against the same companies, accusing them of similar copyright infringements. Last year, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey accused both OpenAI and Meta of copyright infringement.
Similarly, authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in June 2023. The lawsuit not only demands compensation for the alleged copyright violations but also urges the court to prevent OpenAI from continuing what they deem as “unlawful and unfair business practices.”
In July the same year, a group of leading news publishers also considered suing AI companies over copyright infringement. The publishers allege that the AI firms are infringing on their intellectual property rights and undermining their business model by scraping, summarizing, or rewriting their articles and distributing them on various platforms, such as websites, apps, or social media.
Last Updated on November 7, 2024 3:13 pm CET
