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Apple is the latest tech company to get sued over alleged use of pirated books for AI training.
As Reuters reports, in a lawsuit filed in the federal court in Northern California, authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson accuse Apple of using their copyrighted works without consent or compensation to train the company’s AI models.
The authors make this claim based on details found in Apple’s paper on its OpenELM model. “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,” the lawsuit claims. “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 collection of over 196,000 pirated books. Many AI companies, including Meta, have reportedly used the dataset for AI training purposes. It was, however, taken down in 2023 after Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance submitted a DMCA request.
Given the number of works Apple may have infringed upon, the plaintiffs, Hendrix and Roberson, have requested the court to turn their complaint into a class action and block the company from further infringement of this kind. They also seek compensation for monetary damages.
Books3 was the subject of another major lawsuit recently. A group of authors sued the creator of Claude, Anthropic, last year for using the pirated dataset for its AI training purposes. Last month, the AI startup decided to settle the case, agreeing to pay the authors a record $1.5 billion. Since over 500,000 books were allegedly infringed upon, each work could yield about $3,000.
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Perplexity and OpenAI also face similar copyright infringement lawsuits.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
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About Jibin Joseph
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