The publishing giant called on a recent EU directive that clarifies copyright holders’ rights in the face of data usage by AI firms.
Penguin Random House, one of the world’s largest publishers, has taken action to block firms from training AI systems on its huge portfolio, publishing trade The Bookseller reports.
AI firms often trawl or « scrape » sources like fiction and non-fiction books, newspapers, and social media to train their AI models, which has already caused plenty of legal controversies.
Alongside Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House is considered one of the ‘Big Five’ English language publishers. These are thought to control 80% of the U.S. book trade as of 2022.
Penguin has amended the copyright wording which appears on all its titles worldwide, across all its imprints. It now reads: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner to train artificial intelligence technologies or systems”.
