Federal court sides with OpenAI in AI copyright case

A federal court dismissed a copyright lawsuit filed by two news organizations against OpenAI earlier this year.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon announced decision on Thursday. Plaintiffs Raw Story Media Inc. and AlterNet Media Inc. have the option to reopen the case with certain revisions in the future.

The two publications filed their complaints in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in February. They claimed that OpenAI had included thousands of their papers in three AI datasets. According to the lawsuit, the company used these datasets to train some of the large language models that form the basis of ChatGPT.

The complaint did not accuse OpenAI of copyright infringement. Instead, he was faced with the fact that the AI ​​provider removed copyright management information (CMI) from the publications’ articles before including them in the training datasets.

CMI is a legal term that covers details such as the author and title of an article. The plaintiffs alleged in their lawsuit that OpenAI’s removal of CMI information violated a 1998 statute called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Raw Story and AlterNet argued that this practice made OpenAI liable to pay compensation.

In the second part of the case, interim measures were requested. This is a court order designed to stop a specific practice, in this case the use of articles for AI training without relevant CMI information. The lawsuit stated that the injunction was necessary due to the risk that ChatGPT would display copyrighted content on Raw Story and AlterNet without CMI details such as article titles.

In its legal response, OpenAI asked the court to dismiss the case. The ChatGPT developer’s argument focused on the fact that such lawsuits can only proceed if plaintiffs can prove that they have suffered “concrete harm.” Raw Story and AlterNet argued that OpenAI’s “unlawful removal of CMI from a copyrighted work” qualifies as such harm.

The court sided with OpenAI. “Let’s be clear about what’s really at stake here,” McMahon wrote in the decision. “The alleged injury for which Plaintiffs truly seek relief is not the exclusion of CMI from Defendants’ training sets, but Defendants’ use of Plaintiffs’ articles to develop ChatGPT without compensating Plaintiffs.”

The decision allows Raw Story and AlterNet to reopen the case under certain conditions. Specifically, publications must provide “an explanation of why the proposed change would not be futile.”

“We build our AI models using publicly available data, protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal precedents,” OpenAI said in a statement.

OpenAI still faces copyright lawsuits from more than half a dozen publications. Last December, The New York Times lawsuit filed ChatGPT developer and Microsoft Corp. allegedly used millions of articles in the article without permission. A group of eight news sources filed A similar complaint was filed against two companies in April.

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