Santa Clara, California – Nvidia, a prominent AI-focused company, is facing a copyright lawsuit filed by a group of authors who claim that the company used copyrighted books without their permission to train its NeMo AI platform. The authors, Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Stewart O’Nan, allege that their books were included in a dataset of around 196,640 works that were used to train NeMo in simulating normal written language. The dataset was later removed due to reported copyright infringement.
The lawsuit argues that the removal of the books from the dataset is an admission by Nvidia that NeMo was indeed trained on copyrighted material, thus infringing on the authors’ rights. The authors are seeking unspecified damages on behalf of individuals in the United States whose copyrighted works contributed to the training of NeMo’s large language models in the past three years.
Nvidia, when approached for comment, declined to provide a statement on the matter.
This class-action lawsuit is the latest in a series of similar litigations targeting AI companies. In December, a group of 11 authors joined a lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement. The New York Times also filed its own copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that they used its content without consent for the development of their AI products.
Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market has led to its rapid growth and increasing market value. The company is on the verge of overtaking Apple as the world’s second-most valuable company. Last week, Nvidia’s market capitalization reached $2 trillion, surpassing Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Saudi Aramco.
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s market capitalization is nearing the $2.38 trillion mark, with Apple holding the top spot and Microsoft leading by $645 billion.