A lawsuit has been filed against global chipmaker Nvidia by three authors who claim that their copyrighted books were used without permission on its AI platform. The legal action, filed in San Francisco federal court, alleges that Nvidia utilized a dataset of approximately 196,640 books, including works by authors Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Stewart O’Nan, to train its NeMo platform.
The authors assert that their material was used to model ‘ordinary written language’ before being removed in response to reported copyright violations in October. Specific works mentioned in the lawsuit include the novel ‘Ghost Walk’ from 2008, ‘Like a Love Story’ from 2019, and the novella ‘Last Night at the Lobster’ from 2007.
The authors are seeking unspecified damages on behalf of individuals in the U.S. whose copyrighted content was employed to train Nvidia’s NeMo language models over a three-year period.
NeMo is described as an end-to-end, cloud-native framework that enables the creation, customization, and deployment of generative AI models across various platforms. A key function of the platform is the development of chatbots capable of providing accurate responses to domain-specific queries in natural language using up-to-date information.
Nvidia has not released a statement regarding the lawsuit.
AI Industry and Copyright Issues
Nvidia is not the sole AI company facing copyright-related legal challenges. Towards the end of 2024, The New York Times reported on a case involving the publication suing OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of copyrighted material by AI systems. The lawsuit claims that ‘millions of articles’ from the publication were utilized to train automated chatbots.
The publisher reportedly raised concerns about intellectual property infringement with Microsoft and OpenAI in April prior to taking legal action. While OpenAI filed a motion in federal court in February 2024 to dismiss certain aspects of the lawsuit, the case is ongoing.
OpenAI was also embroiled in another legal dispute involving authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, who accused ChatGPT of unlawfully copying their content. In February 2024, parts of the lawsuit were dismissed.
Featured image: Via Ideogram
