OpenAI is facing multiple lawsuits for allegedly using content from several publications and books to train large-scale language models without explicit permission or appropriate compensation. The judge just rejected one of them. New York federal judge Colleen McMahon has dismissed a lawsuit filed by Raw Story and AlterNet alleging that the companies used their materials for AI training without their consent. However, as VentureBeat points out, their complaint does not allege that OpenAI infringes copyright, unlike other publications’ lawsuits. Instead, it focused on DMCA provisions that protect “copyright management information.”
The publication claimed that OpenAI removed author names, titles, and other metadata identifying copyright from the articles it used to train LLM. McMahon explained that the plaintiffs have not shown that they suffered “any appreciable injury” from these actions, and that the harms they cite are “not of the aggravated type” to warrant litigation. The judge also said that it “seems unlikely that ChatGPT would output plagiarized content from one of (their) articles.” He added that what the plaintiffs are truly seeking relief for is not the removal of the copyright management information, but relief for the use of the article “to develop ChatGPT without charge.”
Lawyers told Reuters that Law Story and Alternet have no intention of exiting. “We are confident that (they) will be able to address the concerns that the court has identified through the amended complaint,” their attorney Matt Topic said in a statement.
