Books 3 has revealed thousands of pirated Australian books. In the age of AI, is copyright law still fit for purpose?
Thousands of Australian books have been found on a pirated dataset of ebooks, known as Books3, used to train generative AI.
- Thousands of Australian books have been found on a pirated dataset of ebooks, known as Books3, used to train generative AI.
- Richard Flanagan, Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Tim Flannery are among the leading local authors affected – along, of course, with writers from around the world.
AI moving at speed
- Just last year, the issue of AI was only faintly on the cultural radar.
- But while AI technology is moving at high speed, the law moves slowly.
- Read more:
Authors are resisting AI with petitions and lawsuits.
A spate of copyright disputes
- There has been a spate of copyright disputes around AI datasets and copyright-protected works.
- Earlier this month, the US Authors Guild filed a class action, with 17 authors including Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult, against OpenAI for copyright infringement.
- This followed the first copyright lawsuit against OpenAI in July.
Copyright is not the answer
- Likewise, copyright law’s rules on fair dealing in Australia and fair use in the United States would likely protect some uses.
- Read more:
Prosecraft has infuriated authors by using their books without consent – but what does copyright law say?
‘A type of market failure’
- The difference then was that these technologies did not fundamentally threaten artistic and creative labour in the way AI does.
- To appropriate a part of someone’s market is a radically different thing to producing a product that could entirely displace them in that market.
- A type of market failure is occurring here, because authors are not being compensated even though their works, collectively, are the basis for new and commercially viable AI products.