Nvidia Faces Lawsuit from Authors Over Copyright Infringement
Three authors, Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Stewart O’Nan, have filed a lawsuit against Nvidia for allegedly using their copyrighted books without permission to train its NeMo AI platform. The authors claimed that their works were included in a dataset of approximately 196,640 books used to teach NeMo to generate normal written language. This dataset was later removed in October due to reported copyright violations.
The authors’ class action lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco federal court, alleges that Nvidia infringed on their copyrights by admitting to training NeMo on the dataset. They are seeking damages for individuals in the United States whose copyrighted materials contributed to training NeMo’s large language models over the past three years. Some of the works involved in the lawsuit include Keene’s “Ghost Walk,” Nazemian’s “Like a Love Story,” and O’Nan’s “Last Night at the Lobster.”
Nvidia has refrained from commenting on the matter, while legal representatives for the authors have yet to respond to requests for further statements. This legal action adds Nvidia to a growing list of companies facing litigation from authors and organizations like the New York Times regarding generative AI technologies that create new content based on existing inputs.
NeMo is promoted by Nvidia as an efficient and cost-effective means of adopting generative AI capabilities. Other companies, such as OpenAI and Microsoft, have also been sued for their involvement in generative AI technologies.
The increasing prominence of AI has boosted Nvidia’s popularity among investors, with the company’s stock price surging nearly 600% since the end of 2022, resulting in a market value of close to $2.2 trillion. The lawsuit against Nvidia is identified as Nazemian et al v Nvidia Corp, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 24-01454.
This development was reported by Jonathan Stempel in New York and edited by Josie Kao, in line with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.