Investors sue Adobe execs over AI copyright statements

[highplainsdem]

https://courthousenews.com/investors-sue-adobe-execs-over-ai-copyright-statements/

The stockholders say in their complaint that in 2024 and 2025 Adobe officers “caused Adobe to make false and misleading statements about its artificial intelligence strategy, characterizing the strategy as a ‘generational opportunity’ to enhance productivity and creativity through responsible, ‘commercially safe’ models natively integrated into its software ecosystem,”

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Additionally, they say the defendants — including former Adobe Chief Executive Officer Shantanu Narayen; Adobe director Christiano Amon, the current president and CEO of Qualcomm Incorporated, a global wireless tech company; Claude Alexandre, Adobe’s vice president of digital media; and over ten other high-ranking employees at Adobe — signed and approved statements that Adobe didn’t infringe any copyrighted material as part of training its AI software.

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According to the stockholders, one of Adobe’s AI training models relied on a dataset that consisted of approximately 196,640 books copied from Bibliotik, “an online shadow-library known for distributing copyrighted literary works without authorization from authors, publishers, or other rights holder.”

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“Adobe’s officers and directors knowingly allowed the company to build its AI strategy on the unlawful infringement of copyrighted materials,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Frank Bottini said in a statement to Courthouse News. “This shareholder derivative suit seeks to hold Adobe’s top leadership liable for destroying billions of dollars in shareholder value.”

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The entire generative AI industry is built on the theft of copyrighted intellectual property.