I’m often asked, since I’m on the board of the Society of Authors, why legal action isn’t underway in the UK to hold the big tech companies to account for their wholesale and blatant breaches of copyright in using authors’ work scraped from pirate websites?
Well, for a start, class action lawsuits are much more difficult and complicated under English law than in the US. Even relatively straightforward cases can, and most likely will, take years to reach a conclusion and cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. Especially when the other side has more money to spend than many countries’ annual budgets, and every interest in finding procedural ways to drag things out, in order to exhaust the plaintiff’s financial and other resources.
What can make a significant difference to a defendant’s attitude to the threat of UK litigation, and indeed to the prospects for certifying a class action in the UK courts, are judgements elsewhere which have gone against them on the same grounds. This is why recent developments in the US are important, and not only for American authors.
Firstly –
“On Wednesday, July 16, bestselling author David Baldacci delivered powerful testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, laying bare the devastating impact of AI companies’ systematic theft of copyrighted works. “I truly felt like someone had backed up a truck to my imagination and stolen everything I’d ever created,” Baldacci told the subcommittee, describing his discovery that AI companies had pirated his entire body of work to train their systems.
The moment of recognition came when Baldacci’s son asked ChatGPT to write a plot that read like a Baldacci novel. “In about five seconds, three pages came up that had elements of pretty much every book I’d ever written, including plot lines, character names, narrative, the works.”
You can read the full article here, and I recommend you do so.
Secondly –
“A California federal judge ruled Thursday that three authors suing Anthropic over copyright infringement can bring a class action lawsuit representing all U.S. writers whose work was allegedly downloaded from libraries of pirated works.
The filing alleges that Anthropic, the Amazon-backed OpenAI competitor behind the chatbot Claude, “violated the Copyright Act by doing Napster-style downloading of millions of works.” It alleges that the company downloaded as many as seven million copies of books from libraries of pirated works.”
We have to keep in mind this is a marathon, not a sprint. Frustrating as that is.
