• by Ray Schultz , October 21, 2024

This may not work for daily news outlets, but book publisher Penguin Randomhouse has altered its copyright page to say “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.”

This implies that the publisher will protect its content legally and any other way that is required.  

According to Bookseller, which broke the news, Penguin seems to be the first major publisher to try this. 

The statement also says that the publisher “expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception.”

This language also appears to conform with EU law, which allows publishers to opt out of having their content scraped, Gizmodo reports.  

However, it is not clear how, if at all, the language could be enforced in the U.S.  

Like many newspapers and magazines, and academic printers like Taylor & Francis, Wiley and Oxford University Press, have signed deals licensing their material to AI forms, Gizmodo continues. 

However, numerous news publishers — The New York Times and Alden Global Capital to name two — have filed lawsuits seeking to block AI firms from scraping their stories and using them train their algorithms.