- Adobe accused of using pirated books to train SlimLM
- The company claims it used SlimPajama-627B – an open source Cerebras dataset
- The plaintiff claims sufficient financial resources to “vigorously” pursue this case
Adobe is facing an AI copyright lawsuit in the US with a class action alleging the company trained its AI models on pirated books without permission.
Oregon author Elizabeth Lyon filed the suit, claiming the tech giant had trained its AI models not only on her books, but also the work of others.
The lawsuit specifically focuses on Adobe’s SlimLM small language models, which are used for document assistance tasks on mobile devices.
Adobe faces AI training data class action lawsuit
The company has denied the allegations, claiming that SlimLM was trained on SlimPajama-627B – an open-source dataset released by Cerebras in 2023. However, the lawsuit alleges that SlimPajama is a derivative of RedPajama, which allegedly includes Books3 – a nearly 200-book dataset that contains nearly 200 pirated books.
In short, Lyon claims that because SlimPajama includes RedPajama/Books3, it contains copyrighted work without consent, credit or compensation.
Adobe is also accused of “repeatedly downloading, copying and processing these works during the preprocessing and pretraining of the models.”
This is not the first time that RedPajama or Books3 have been involved in litigation, having previously appeared in lawsuits against Apple and Salesforce.
Lyon says she is “committed to vigorously prosecuting this action on behalf of the other members of the class” and that she has “the financial resources to do so.”
The plaintiff is seeking “an award of statutory and other damages,” reimbursement of attorney’s fees, and a declaration of willful infringement from Adobe.
TechRadar Pro has sought a formal response from Adobe, but the company has yet to respond.
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