New York Times Reporter, Authors Sue Google, OpenAI, Meta Over AI-Based Copyright Infringement

Google, OpenAI and several other artificial intelligence (AI) companies are facing a new copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of authors. On Monday, a New York Times reporter and several other authors, who had previously opted out of the out-of-court settlement offered by Anthropic in a similar lawsuit, sued a larger group of AI companies, including the Claude maker. Interestingly, this is the first time a copyright violation allegation has been made against Elon Musk-owned xAI. The other names are currently battling multiple similar cases.

Major AI Companies Hit by a Fresh Copyright Infringement Lawsuit

According to the document (via Bloomberg Law), Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, Perplexity, and xAI were named in the lawsuit filed with the US District Court in the Northern District of California. Among the complainants is John Carreyrou, an NYT investigative journalist who is known for exposing fraud in the blood-testing startup, Theranos.

Carreyrou and the five other authors have opted against a class action lawsuit and have taken it up individually. This makes sense as the last time this group filed the lawsuit against Anthropic, the final settlement amount was $1.5 billion (roughly Rs. 13,470 crore), but each author was only entitled to $3,000 (roughly Rs. 2.6 lakh). The main allegation is that these companies are using their copyrighted work to train large language models (LLMs).

According to Reuters, this is the first time a copyright infringement lawsuit has named xAI as a defendant. Perplexity, on the other hand, has reportedly denied the allegations. A company spokesperson told the publication that the platform does not index books.

“This case concerns a straightforward and deliberate act of theft that constitutes copyright infringement,” the document alleged, adding, “Rather than obtain licences or pay for the use of these works, each defendant downloaded pirated copies of plaintiffs' books from shadow-library websites such as LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF and then reproduced, parsed, analysed, re-copied, used, and embedded those works into their LLMs (and/or used those works to optimize their product) to accelerate commercial development and win the generative-AI race.”

The plaintiffs have requested a jury trial and are seeking statutory damages and a full account of the copyrighted works each company has used to train their AI models.