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News outlets sue OpenAI for violating copyright laws
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: April 12, 2024
Just to catch up on things:
OpenAI owns and operates ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is “trained” on a claimed trillion data points organized into data sets that are vacuumed up throughout the internet.
Lots of that stuff that’s vacuumed up is copyrighted. ChatGPT don’t care about your stinkin’ copyrights. It will infringe at will.
And now, in something as predictable as gravity, OpenAI is being sued by some real professional journalists for said copyright infringement.
To be specific, the news outlets The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI in mid-February.
The news organizations allege in their complaint that thousands of their stories were used by OpenAI to train their chatbots and to create datasets that can be accessed by those chatbots to create the iterative responses to prompts typed into OpenAI.
OpenAI has never denied that they do this. In fact, the AI company has signed licensing agreements with some news outlets, including the Associated Press, according to an AP article on these lawsuits published on Feb. 28.
The New York Times has also sued OpenAI after their negotiations broke down. Sarah Silverman, too.
Before you feel too bad for the Palo Alto techbros being accused of breaking the law, remember that it had a valuation of about $80 billion about a year ago, and could easily pay everyone for the use of their copyrighted material.
But, no.
The lawsuit has an interesting legal theory underpinning the suit. Rather than give specific instances of stories that they allege OpenAI took without permission, the lawsuit instead gives examples of stories created by the chatbot that the suit claims clearly used copyrighted material owned by the plaintiffs.
“When providing responses, ChatGPT gives the impression that it is an all-knowing ‘intelligent’ source of the information being provided, when in reality, the responses are frequently based on copyrighted works of journalism that ChatGPT simply mimics,” according to the suit.
The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, relies on common law copyright, since none of the stories at issue have received copyright protection through the USPTO. It asks for $2,500 in damages for each instance of copyright violation.
We will stay tuned for progress on all these suits.