New York Times reporter John Carreyrou, former Wall Street Journal reporter Philip Shishkin and three others are suing several tech giants, including OpenAI and Meta, for copyright infringement. According to the writers’ claim, these companies illegally procured their work to help train their LLMs.
The suit, filed on Monday in California, lists Carreyrou, Shishkin, Lisa Barretta, Jane Adams, Matthew Sacks and Michael Kochin as joint plaintiffs, alleges “a straightforward and deliberate act of theft that constitutes copyright infringement.”
“Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI and Perplexity, illegally copied vast quantities of copyrighted books without permission and then used those stolen copies to build and train their commercial large language models (‘LLMs’) and/or optimize their product,” it reads. “Defendants helped themselves to the copyrighted works of hundreds of authors—including bestselling writers, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, and creators of widely read nonfiction and fiction.”
The suit continues: “Rather than obtain licenses 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, analyzed, 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 writers are demanding a jury trial for each company, calling their actions “willful” and illegal. Each plaintiff is seeking statutory damages of an unspecified amount, awards of restitution, disgorgement, costs, expenses, attorneys’ fees and a permanent injunction against the companies to prevent them from further use of the materials.
Carreyrou is an author in addition to his work at the New York Times, as he notably wrote “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.” According to the suit, his writing is available in “shadow libraries” and “there is accordingly a reasonable inference that Defendants illegally downloaded Carreyrou’s work.”
Earlier this month, the New York Times itself filed suit against OpenAI for copyright infringement, as well.
Barretta is the author of “The Street-Smart Psychic’s Guide to Getting a Good Reading,” while Shishkin wrote “Restless Valley: Revolution, Murder and Intrigue in the Heart of Central Asia.”
Adams cites two of her works being illegally downloaded: “Boundary Issues: Using Boundary Intelligence to Get the Intimacy You Want and the Independence You Need in Life, Love, and Work” and “How to Sell What You Write.”
The suit also alleges that Matthew Sacks’ “Pro Website Development and Operations” was used, alongside Kochin’s “Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing & Art.”
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