Apple is the latest tech company to face legal action over the alleged use of pirated books in AI training datasets.
Authors Accuse Apple of Copyright Infringement
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Northern California, authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson allege Apple used their copyrighted works without permission or payment to train its AI models. The complaint cites Apple’s OpenELM research paper, claiming the company relied on Books3, a massive dataset containing pirated books.
The lawsuit states: “Apple 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.”
Books3 was an online dataset containing more than 196,000 pirated books, used by multiple AI companies for training purposes. It was taken down in 2023 after Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance filed a DMCA request. Despite its removal, lawsuits continue to surface against companies accused of leveraging it.
Class Action Request
Hendrix and Roberson are asking the court to classify their case as a class action lawsuit, which could include a large number of authors affected by the alleged use of Books3. They are seeking monetary damages and an injunction preventing Apple from further use of pirated works.
Books3 has been at the center of other lawsuits. Last year, authors sued Anthropic, the maker of Claude, for the same issue. In August, Anthropic agreed to settle, paying $1.5 billion to affected authors. With over 500,000 books allegedly infringed, each title could yield compensation of about $3,000.
What The Author Thinks
The lawsuit against Apple highlights an uncomfortable truth: the race to build competitive AI models has often come at the expense of intellectual property rights. If giants like Apple are proven to have used pirated material, it could force the entire industry to rethink how datasets are sourced. AI development may be advancing at breakneck speed, but without respecting creators, it risks sparking a wave of costly lawsuits that could stall innovation altogether.
Featured image credit: Heute
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