Apple is facing a second proposed class action lawsuit in as many months alleging copyright infringement related to the training of its artificial intelligence models. Neuroscience professors Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of SUNY Downstate Health sciences University in Brooklyn, NY, filed the suit, claiming Apple used their copyrighted works without permission.
The lawsuit, first reported by Bloomberg Law, alleges Apple trained its AI using pirated books obtained through “shadow libraries” and web-crawling software. This follows a similar suit filed recently by a separate pair of authors who also claim Apple infringed on their copyrights by using published works to train its Apple Intelligence models without consent.
The growing number of copyright claims against tech companies developing AI highlights the legal challenges surrounding the use of copyrighted material in AI training.OpenAI is also embroiled in a similar dispute with The New York Times.Earlier this year, Anthropic settled a class action lawsuit for $1.5 billion with 500,000 authors, establishing a potential precedent in these types of cases.
