Apple sued by authors for using copyrighted books in AI training
Authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson sued Apple in a class action lawsuit, alleging the company used their copyrighted books without permission to train its OpenELM language models and Apple Intelligence through a pirated dataset called Books3. The plaintiffs claim Apple's use was deliberate, commercially significant, and uncompensated, while the company had selectively licensed content from other sources.
What happened
Authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, alleging the company used their copyrighted books without permission to train its OpenELM large language models and Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models.
According to the complaint, Apple used a dataset called Books3, consisting of pirated copyrighted books obtained through its Applebot web scraper, which had been collecting content from the internet and shadow libraries for nearly nine years.
Reported impact
The plaintiffs claim Apple's use of their works was deliberate and commercially significant, as Apple Intelligence is expected to add trillions of dollars to the company's market capitalization in coming years, while Apple provided no compensation to the authors.
Index analysis
Apple selectively licensed content from Shutterstock but did not license works from the plaintiffs or other authors in the class, and concealed the sources of its training datasets to evade legal scrutiny.
Governance controls
The lawsuit claims a class period of three years before filing and seeks damages and injunctive relief, with plaintiffs demanding a jury trial for all claims.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.