Apple, Tech Giants Sued by Chicken Soup for the Soul Over AI Training Data
Publisher Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC, has filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California against several major technology companies, including Apple, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. The suit, filed on March 17, alleges that the firms used copyrighted material without permission or compensation to train their artificial intelligence systems. The complaint specifically claims that hundreds of Chicken Soup for the Soul's works were ingested to develop large language models. A central allegation in the lawsuit involves the use of a dataset known as 'The Pile.' The publisher claims that an OpenAI employee, in 2018, downloaded pirated books from the 'shadow library' site Library Genesis to create internal datasets for AI training. This site has previously been subject to court injunctions. The lawsuit argues that this pirated data, which included copyrighted books, was subsequently used by the named companies to build their AI technologies. While Apple is named among the defendants, the company has issued a firm denial regarding the core allegation. Apple has stated that the specific dataset in question, 'The Pile,' does not power its own AI system, Apple Intelligence. This positions Apple to argue that it should not be included in a case focused on the alleged misuse of that particular data source, even as the broader legal challenge against the tech industry's data-scraping practices moves forward.
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Chicken Soup for the Soul is suing ... Apple, and Nvidia for copyright infringement. The suit, filed March 17 in the Northern District of California, alleges that hundreds of its copyrighted works were ingested without authorization or compensation to train large language models. In a noteworthy claim, the lawsuit alleges that in 2018, an OpenAI employee downloaded pirated books from Library Genesis—a shadow library repeatedly enjoined by federal courts—to create internal datasets later used ...
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