Nvidia Contacted Anna's Archive to Access Books

Summary

Chip giant NVIDIA has been one of the main financial beneficiaries in the artificial intelligence boom. Revenue surged due to high demand for its AI-learning chips and data center services, and the end doesn’t appear to be in sight. Besides selling the most sought-after hardware, NVIDIA is also developing its own models, including NeMo, Retro-48B, InstructRetro, and Megatron. These are trained using their own hardware and with help from large text libraries, much like other tech giants do. Authors Sue NVIDIA for Copyright Infringement Like other tech companies, NVIDIA has also seen significant legal pushback from copyright holders in response to its training methods. This includes authors, who, in various lawsuits, accused tech companies of training their models on pirated books. In early 2024, for example, several authors sued NVIDIA over alleged copyright infringement. Through the class action lawsuit, they claimed that the company’s AI models were trained on the Books3 dataset that included copyrighted works taken from the ‘pirate’ site Bibliotik. Since this happened without permission, the authors demanded compensation. In response, NVIDIA defended its actions as fair use, noting that books are nothing more than statistical correlations to its AI models. However, the allegations didn’t go away. On the contrary, the plaintiffs found more evidence during discovery. ‘NVIDIA Contacted Anna’s Archive’ Last Friday, the authors filed an amended complaint that significantly expands the scope of the lawsuit. In addition to adding more books, authors, and AI models, it also includes broader “shadow library” claims and allegations. The authors, including Abdi Nazemian, now cite various internal Nvidia emails and documents, suggesting that the company willingly downloaded millions of copyrighted books. The new complaint alleges that “competitive pressures drove NVIDIA to piracy”, which allegedly included collaborating with the controversial Anna’s Archive library. Competiti...