Hi AUDITORY lists, apologies for cross-posting but please see below for an important US-based lawsuit regarding AI scraping of your work. You do not need to live in the US to indicate to the attorneys involved that you may be a member of the affected class.
Sam
———
Samuel Mehr
School of Psychology, University of Auckland
and Child Study Center, Yale University
Be a citizen scientist at themusiclab.org!
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Samuel Mehr <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, Aug 28, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Subject: Fwd: [Academic] lawsuit regarding AI scraping your work
To: CDS list <cogdevsoc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Dear CDS, it's going around on Bluesky already, but for the less-Online folks, please see below for information regarding a large class-action suit regarding AI companies using our work to train LLMs.
Most if not all of us will have one or more books or articles in the LibGen database, and so are eligible to be part of the lawsuit.
I sent the below email to my department but if you'd like to spread the word to yours, please feel free to steal my text and adapt it however you like.
best from NZ,
Sam
———
Samuel Mehr
School of Psychology, University of Auckland
and Child Study Center, Yale University
Be a citizen scientist at themusiclab.org!
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Samuel Mehr <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, Aug 28, 2025 at 11:53 AM
Subject: [Academic] lawsuit regarding AI scraping your work
To: psych-academic Mailing List <psych-academic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Hi all, a high-profile law firm in the US, Lieff Cabraser, is leading a class-action lawsuit against AI firm Anthropic for scraping the database LibGen to train their models, without asking permission of the people who produced the books, articles, and other content that is in LibGen.
LibGen contains so much academic work that your papers and/or books are probably in it, even if you've never heard of the database. You can check if your work is involved by searching your name at this handy tool at the Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/. Use all alternative spellings of your name to find all matches (I found some with Samuel A Mehr and some with SA Mehr).
If your work was included in LibGen at the time Anthropic scraped the database, and if your publisher is subject to US copyright law (this covers most work published in most academic journals), you can be a member of the class action suit. All you need to do is submit your name and article/book information at the attorneys' website:
https://www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-author-contact/. For people without US addresses, like most of us in the department here, you can put the address of the associated publisher; just google "Elsevier NYC" or similar to find it.
Lieff Cabraser is a serious firm who has successfully taken on the likes of Apple, Google, and Adobe in trust-busting cases and this case is likely to be the largest in history concerning intellectual property and artificial intelligence. Not only does this mean it's important in its own right but it also means that it's likely affected authors (including many of us) will get paid a bit of $ if/when it settles, so there's a nice incentive too.
Please have a look at the database, consider signing up, and feel free to forward this email around. The more academics who get on the attorneys' list, the larger the impact of the class-action and the more likely it is that AI companies will be pressured to stop stealing our work.
Sam
———
Samuel Mehr
School of Psychology, University of Auckland
and Child Study Center, Yale University
Be a citizen scientist at themusiclab.org!