UAB dba Planner 5D sued Facebook and Princeton for copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation under both the Defend Trade Secrets Act and California UTSA, based on use of an AI dataset. The plaintiff alleges that it owns a large dataset of three-dimensional objects and scenes. Princeton allegedly downloaded thousands of scenes by scraping the plaintiff’s website and used the dataset for scene-recognition activities. Princeton later published the data it gathered publicly. Later, Facebook allegedly sponsored an AI competition wherein contestants were directed to use the dataset. The complaint alleges that both Princeton and Facebook have used the dataset to train artificial intelligence applications to recognize 3D interior scenes.

The complaint asserts that each object in the dataset and the dataset compilation comprise copyrights that Defendants infringed. Plaintiff also alleges the Defendants misappropriated trade secrets in the datasets by scraping them from Plaintiff’s website.