Judge dismisses news outlets' lawsuit against OpenAI

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed two news outlets’ lawsuit against OpenAI over its use of their copyrighted content to train ChatGPT, finding that failed to show an actual injury.

Raw Story and AlterNet sued the artificial intelligence (AI) company in February, alleging that it removed the copyright management information from their articles before feeding them into ChatGPT.

As a result, the news outlets argued that it’s likely the chatbot would reproduce their work without the accompanying copyright information.

However, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that Raw Story and AlterNet lack standing to bring the case against OpenAI because they failed to allege “any actual adverse effects” from the removal of their copyright information.

“Given the quantity of information contained in the repository, the likelihood that ChatGPT would output plagiarized content from one of Plaintiffs' articles seems remote,” McMahon wrote.

She noted that while an earlier version of ChatGPT may have produced responses with a significant amount of plagiarized content, there does not seem to be a substantial risk that the current version would do so.

While she dismissed the case, McMahon emphasized that there are legal questions that remain about the use of copyrighted materials to train AI models.

“Let us be clear about what is really at stake here,” she said. “The alleged injury for which Plaintiffs truly seek redress is not the exclusion of CMI from Defendants' training sets, but rather Defendants' use of Plaintiffs' articles to develop ChatGPT without compensation to Plaintiff.”

“Whether there is another statute or legal theory that does elevate this type of harm remains to be seen,” McMahon added. “But that question is not before the Court today.”

Several other news outlets, including The New York Times, have brought copyright lawsuits against OpenAI over the use of their articles to train ChatGPT.

However, many outlets and media companies, including The Associated Press, Axel Springer, News Corp, The Atlantic and Vox Media, have also reached licensing agreements with the AI company. Axel Springer owns Politico and Business Insider, while News Corp owns The Wall Street Journal and New York Post.