Martinez-Conde v. Apple Inc.

On 9 October 2025, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik commenced class action proceedings against Apple Inc. in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging direct copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 501. The Complaint asserts that Apple reproduced copyrighted works without authorisation by utilising the Books3 dataset (a notorious shadow library derived from the Bibliotik private tracker containing approximately 196,640 books) as training data for its OpenELM language models and Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models. According to the pleadings, Apple's own model card on Hugging Face and its OpenELM research paper confirm that training data included the Books3 component of The Pile dataset and a subset of RedPajama-V1, both of which incorporate Books3. The Complaint further alleges that Apple deployed its web-crawler, Applebot, to scrape shadow libraries and other publicly available internet content for nearly nine years before disclosing its intent to use that data for AI training, by which time the Foundation Language Models had already been trained. The Plaintiffs' work, "Sleights of Mind", is confirmed to appear in Books3; Champions of Illusion is alleged to appear in the Library Genesis shadow library.

The Complaint emphasises that Apple struck licensing agreements with Shutterstock and approached news organisations including Condé Nast and NBC News, yet made no effort to compensate authors whose works it copied. A single cause of action is advanced: direct copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501.

The Plaintiffs seek class certification, statutory and compensatory damages, a permanent injunction, destruction of all infringing Apple Intelligence models and training sets incorporating class members' works, and attorneys' fees and costs.