Overview

• The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California as a proposed class action.
• Plaintiffs Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik, professors at SUNY Downstate, allege Apple copied their books “Champions of Illusion” and “Sleights of Mind” without permission.
• The filing claims Apple relied on shadow libraries, web-crawling tools, and datasets such as Books3 and The Pile that are referenced in Apple documentation.
• The suit seeks a jury trial, monetary damages, and destruction of any models and training sets that incorporate the disputed works.
• The case follows a similar September complaint by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson and forms part of wider AI copyright litigation, including Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement and The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI.