Copyright Clash: Authors vs. AI Titans Heads to New York
Twelve copyright infringement lawsuits in the US against OpenAI and Microsoft have been consolidated in New York. These lawsuits, initially brought in California by well-known authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, and comedian Sarah Silverman, will be transferred to New York and combined with existing lawsuits from news organizations, including the New York Times, as well as other authors such as John Grisham, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen, and Jodi Picoult.
Despite the fact that most of the plaintiffs were against combining the cases, arguing that their situations were too distinct, the court order for the transfer explains that the lawsuits share “common factual questions” stemming from claims that “OpenAI and Microsoft used copyrighted works without permission or payment to train their large language models (LLMs)… which power the Defendants’ AI-generated products,” such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.
The tech companies are defending their actions by citing the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of copyrighted material under specific conditions.
A spokesperson for OpenAI stated to Reuters
“We welcome this development and look forward to demonstrating in court that our models are trained on publicly available data, consistent with the principle of fair use and in support of innovation.”
Many of the prominent authors suing OpenAI have also filed similar copyright infringement lawsuits against Meta regarding the training of its AI models. A lawsuit filed in January by Coates, Silverman, and Díaz alleges that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg authorized the company’s use of the well-known “shadow library” LibGen, which contains over 7.5 million books.
Just this past Thursday, authors held a protest outside Meta’s London offices to voice their opposition to the company’s use of copyrighted books.
