If versions of any of your books are on LibGen or similar online collections of pirated material, there is a chance it was used as training data for AI, and you may be able to join a lawsuit about it.
Earlier this month, a group of authors sued Anthropic, the firm behind the Claude family of large language models, for copyright infringement.
The lawsuit states:
Anthropic has built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books. Rather than obtaining permission and paying a fair price for the creations it exploits, Anthropic pirated them. Authors spend years conceiving, writing, and pursuing publication of their copyrighted material. The United States Constitution recognizes the fundamental principle that creators deserve compensation for their work. Yet Anthropic ignored copyright protections. An essential component of Anthropic’s business model—and its flagship “Claude” family of large language models (or “LLMs”)—is the largescale theft of copyrighted works…
Anthropic has not even attempted to compensate Plaintiffs for the use of their material. In fact, Anthropic has taken multiple steps to hide the full extent of its copyright theft. Copyright law prohibits what Anthropic has done here: downloading and copying hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books taken from pirated and illegal websites.
The group of authors includes writers of fiction and non-fiction. They want the court to require Anthropic to pay damages and to prevent the company from using pirated material in the future.
The attorneys for the plaintiff are from the firm Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein. If you believe your work was among the pirated material scraped by Anthropic, you can provide the firm with your contact information here.
The full text of the lawsuit is below (and also here).
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(via Jennifer Mensch)
