Apple hit with copyright lawsuit by authors

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Apple Inc has been sued by authors who accuse the company of illegally copying their books to train its artificial intelligence systems.

The proposed class action, filed on Friday in federal court in Northern California by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, alleges Apple used a body of pirated books to train its "OpenELM" large language models without consent, credit or compensation.

"Apple has not attempted to pay these authors for their contributions to this potentially lucrative venture," the complaint said, according to Reuters. 

The case adds to a growing wave of copyright lawsuits against major technology companies. 

Also Read: US judge vindicates Anthropic in copyright case

In June, a group of writers including George R R Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult sued OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, alleging misappropriation of their works. Meta Platforms also faces similar claims over its LLaMA model.

Some cases have begun to yield major settlements. 

Also Read: OpenAI accused of training LLMs on copyrighted O'Reilly books

On Friday, Anthropic disclosed in a California court filing that it agreed to pay USD 1.5 billion to settle a class action from authors who said the company used their books without permission to train its Claude chatbot. 

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it was the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history. Anthropic did not admit liability.

Microsoft, too, is defending a lawsuit from authors alleging its Megatron AI model relied on their works without authorisation.