Penguin Random House, the world’s largest commercial book publisher, has updated the copyright disclaimer that appears in every book 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.” The warning will roll out globally on all new releases as well as backlist titles that are reprinted. Tom Weldon, CEO of Penguin Random House UK, has told staff the company will at its discretion “use generative AI tools selectively and responsibly, where we see a clear case that they can advance our goals.”

“The statement also ‘expressly reserves [the titles] from the text and data mining exception,’ in accordance with a European Parliament directive,” The Bookseller reports.

The EU’s so-called “TDM exception” allows copyrighted content to be used for text and data mining purposes without requiring copyright holder permission. While the exception is believed to be intended for non-commercial use, it is of course too new to have been put to the test by the courts.

In August, The Bookseller reported that U.S. authors sued Anthropic over the alleged use of “pirated books” to train its Claude AI chatbot.

“PRH is believed to be the first of the Big Five anglophone trade publishers to amend its copyright information to reflect the acceleration of AI systems and the alleged reliance by tech companies on using published work to train language models” through so-called “scraping” of the works, writes The Bookseller.

The Verge makes the point that the copyright laws already protect authors against unauthorized use, and such warnings have “little to do with actual copyright law.”

Society of Authors CEO Anna Ganley tells The Bookseller that that she hopes authors’ publishing contracts will also be updated to ensure that “publishers guarantee to creators that their consent will be sought before the publisher uses — or allows the use of — generative AI in association with the production of the work — for example, for purposes of narrating, translating, images, cover design — and before the publisher grants any access to, or use of, the work by an AI system.”