Several booksellers across the country say they've received orders from overseas companies for books suspected of being used to train artificial intelligence.
Book Haven in Wellington began receiving orders from North America back in April, up until about a week ago.
"It was quite clear from the start that the orders were computer-generated because they came like within a minute apart [...] The largest one was for like 70 books, which is way more than we normally handle," co-owner Marcus Graf said.
Almost all the books were non-fiction, published before the 1990s and had an International Standard Book Number (ISBN).
"One of them was the history of the Wellington Anglers Club where you would think why would anyone in the US have interest in them, especially in these large numbers?"
After some digging, he and co-owner Anne-Marie Thorby found reports online of books being purchased globally to train AI.
They decided to cancel the orders.
"We're quite concerned about the use of books in that way because in the process they get destroyed the Information in the book is not copied and made available, but is ingested by the AI," Graf said.
Another bookshop in the wider Wellington region told 1News it had also received suspicious overseas orders.
In some cases, the orders were from different email addresses but with the same delivery location.
In Dunedin, Renaissance Books' Malcolm Moncrief-Spittle said he had also received orders to different warehouses in the United States.
He had filled the orders, which were a mixture of New Zealand and overseas titles.
"Some of these books, they've been sitting on my shelf with no one coming to buy them for 15 years or more," he said.
"They haven't been my what I'd call rare or unique books, unique copies. So, I guess that's where you draw the line."
Call for tougher regulation
A senior associate at patent attorneys firm Henry Hughes, Zoe Dewhurst, said the law within New Zealand was clear.
"At the moment under our Copyright Act, the digitisation and scanning of books for the purposes of training AI would be considered a copyright infringement," she said.
Dewhurst added that while New Zealand did have some fair use exceptions to copyright for very specific purposes the US had much broader fair use exceptions.
"What we're seeing is some cases coming out of the US that are allowing this digitisation process under specific circumstances."
She gave an example of the Anthropic court case, where a federal judge approved a NZ$2.5 billion copyright settlement after the company used pirated copies of authors' works to train its Claude chatbot.
"The court decision found that where they had purchased the books and digitised them and were using them to train the AI platform. that was probably considered fair use and allowable in the US," Dewhurst said.
Booksellers Aotearoa NZ association manager Renée Rowland wanted tougher regulation.
"All these books are written by humans, and those humans didn't consent to have their words and their creations training artificial intelligence," she said.
"Regulation isn't keeping up with AI developments and this is another loophole that they're trying to push."
Government considers options
Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Cameron Brewer said generative AI raised important and complex copyright issues, including whether AI developers could use copyright-protected works to train their model.
"Countries are taking different approaches and there is currently no international consensus. New Zealand’s copyright law governs how copyright applies to AI-related activities here, not overseas," he said.
Brewer said Cabinet had invited him to report back by the end of March with options for a copyright framework for generative AI in New Zealand.
"I have not yet received that advice, including on how a framework might apply," he said. "I will consider it carefully when it comes to me.”
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