Yesterday, six authors filed new individual copyright infringement actions against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity AI. The suit, which was filed in the Northern District of California, states the companies copied authors' books from well-known pirate libraries—including LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF—to train their large language models without permission, licensing, or compensation.
They argue, as in previous cases, that high-quality books are the "gold standard" of training data and that the AI companies "used those copies to build systems now worth many hundreds of billions of dollars."
The group of authors, which includes two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Carreyrou, are among those who opted out of the proposed $1.5 billion settlement of the lawsuit against Anthropic, announced in September. The new filing states that the settlement, which would provide $3,000 to authors and/or publishers, is not enough. The suit states that $3,000 is "a tiny fraction (just 2%) of the Copyright Act's statutory ceiling of $150,000 in addition to attorneys' fees per willfully infringed work."
The plaintiffs are indeed seeking $150,000 in statutory damages for each work against each defendant, thus looking for $900,000 in total per work.
In addition to Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, the other writers in the lawsuit are Lisa Barretta, who has written 11 books on spirituality, tattoos, and psychic development; Philip Shishkin, author of Restless Valley, a nonfiction account of Central Asian political turmoil; Jane Adams, a psychologist who has written eight nonfiction books on family relationships and life transitions; Matthew Sack, an IT professional who wrote Pro Website Development and Operations; and Michael Kochin, a political science professor at Tel Aviv University and author of Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing & Art.
The filing is not a class action suit, and though the filing is collective—a somewhat unorthodox action—each author is seeking individual jury trials pertaining to their work. The lawyers leading the case from Freedman Normand Friedland successfully used this strategy before in Henry et al. v. Brown University et al., an antitrust case brought against 17 of the top 25 universities for price fixing college tuition last year.
The process of going to court on an individual basis to challenge deep-pocket companies can be costly, and the attorneys are advancing all costs and legal fees in exchange for a 35% contingency fee.
As of this morning, no date has been set for a preliminary court hearing.
