Federal Judge Dismisses NVIDIA's Vicarious Liability Defense in AI Copyright Suit

SAN FRANCISCO (LN) — U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar on Tuesday denied most of NVIDIA Corp.’s motion to dismiss a copyright class action, allowing authors to proceed with claims that the company trained artificial intelligence models on unauthorized copies of their books. He dismissed the vicarious infringement theory.

Authors Abdi Nazemian, Brian Keene, and Stewart O’Nan filed the proposed class action in March 2024, alleging NVIDIA used copyrighted works from shadow libraries like Anna’s Archive to train its Megatron family of large language models.

The plaintiffs also accused NVIDIA of providing scripts and tools that enabled customers to download and preprocess "The Pile," a dataset containing their copyrighted books, through the NeMo Megatron Framework.

Tigar rejected NVIDIA’s argument that the complaint failed to connect specific models to the infringement. He denied the motion to dismiss allegations concerning the Megatron 345M model, finding the plaintiffs adequately alleged the model was trained on a dataset containing their work.

The judge also refused to dismiss allegations regarding the shadow libraries Pirate Library Mirror and Bibliotik, as well as references to the BitTorrent protocol, which he described as merely a tool rather than a library.

On the issue of third-party liability, Tigar held that the plaintiffs plausibly alleged contributory infringement, noting NVIDIA provided scripts specifically designed to download and extract copyrighted files.

"Advertising or promotion, however, is an example of an inducing act, not a pre-requisite for alleging inducement," Tigar wrote, citing Supreme Court precedent. He noted that the plaintiffs alleged the scripts had no purpose other than to speed up the process of infringement.

However, Tigar dismissed the vicarious infringement claim, ruling the plaintiffs failed to show NVIDIA had the right and ability to control its customers’ independent decisions to access infringing materials.

The judge also concluded the complaint failed to plead a causal relationship between the alleged infringement and any direct financial benefit to NVIDIA, noting the framework was offered for free and had substantial non-infringing uses.

Tigar granted the authors leave to amend the vicarious infringement claim within 21 days.