Penguin Random House is the largest book publisher in the world. They recently updated their copyright page to prohibit AI training on any of their print or e-books. This will now gain legal protection against new search engines and anyone who wants to harvest all the books and protect authors.
The Bookseller reports that Penguin Random House Publishing changed the copyright page at the front of its books to address using any of its titles as a source for AI training. The wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced to train artificial intelligence technologies or systems.”
Penguin Random House is the first of the Big Five publishers to amend its copyright information to reflect the acceleration of AI systems and tech companies’ alleged reliance on published work to train language models.
The new wording also protects against data absorption by noting the publisher “expressly reserves [the titles] from the text and data mining exception.” This part of the amended text comes from a recent European Parliament directive regarding text and data mining exceptions and ownership.