Judge Dismisses Copyright Lawsuit Against OpenAI

U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon has dismissed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. McMahon’s decision, issued Thursday, is a win not justfor OpenAI but for everyone who benefits from ChatGPT and similar programs.

Raw Story Media and AlterNet Media filed the suit in February, complaining that OpenAI used their articles to train ChatGPT and that the bot “regurgitate[s] verbatim or nearly verbatim copyright-protected works of journalism.” The plaintiffs alleged that OpenAI had violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by removing copyright management information—authorship and title—from articles used to train ChatGPT.

McMahon disagreed with the plaintiffs. She rejected their damage claim for failing to specify “any actual adverse effects stemming from this alleged DMCA violation”; without concrete harm, she wrote, there can be no standing. She also noted that while content can by copyrighted, mere information cannot. There is no substantial risk of ChatGPT violating the DMCA, she wrote, because “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’s decision could set a precedent for The New York Times’ ongoing suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, for using millions of its articles to train ChatGPT. The Times suit, filed last year, demands the “destruction” of every large language model and training set “that incorporate[s] Times Works.” The next hearing in that case is set for December 3, 2024.

Jen Sidorova—a policy analyst at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website—points out that artificial intelligence “just scales what researchers have done for decades with data. The ethical landscape hasn’t changed; it’s the business model that needs updating.”

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