MANHATTAN (CN) — OpenAI on Thursday won the dismissal of a federal copyright suit brought by digital news websites Raw Story and AlterNet, with a New York judge finding the outlets failed to identify an appropriate injury from the claimed copyright infringement.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon granted the artificial intelligence company’s motion to dismiss the copyright suit, agreeing that the two news outlets had not adequately argued that they have standing under Article III of the U.S. Constitution.
“Let us be clear about what is really at stake here,” the Clinton-appointed judge wrote. “The alleged injury for which plaintiffs truly seek redress is not the exclusion of copyright management information from defendants’ training sets, but rather defendants’ use of plaintiffs’ articles to develop ChatGPT without compensation to plaintiffs.”
However, she noted in her opinion that dismissal of this particular pleading does not absolve all other ChatGPT infringement claims, saying “whether there is another statute or legal theory that does elevate this type of harm remains to be seen.”
The two digital news outlets jointly sued ChatGPT parent company OpenAI in the Southern District of New York February over unauthorized use of their journalism in artificial intelligence, which they claimed were violations of the Digital Copyright Millennium Act.
Represented by Loevy & Loevy attorney Stephen Stich Match, they argued thousands of their online stories were “scraped” by OpenAI to train chatbots to answer questions posed to it by ChatGPT users, effectively plagiarizing their journalism without permission, payment or credit.
Represented in their motion to dismiss by San Francisco copyright attorney Joseph R. Wetzel, OpenAI argued that Raw Story and AlterNet’s lawsuit was tagging along with other notable copyright infringement suits concerning artificial intelligence, and said the two outlets did not “raise genuinely important copyright issues ripe for judicial resolution.”
“Instead, it is a follow-on lawsuit against OpenAI that represents an attempt to join the fray, but without alleging the facts necessary to present the issues that plaintiffs want to bring before this court,” the artificial intelligence company wrote in a court filing.
OpenAI argued that that Raw Story and AlterNet did not offer a single instance in their complaint in which ChatGPT actually was purported to have mimicked any specific work copyrighted journalism in response to user prompts, “let alone one of plaintiffs’.”
The first of these cases against OpenAI to be filed in the Southern District of New York was brought by the Authors Guild professional organization for writers in September 2023. Seventeen authors joined that suit, including “Game of Thrones” creator George R.R. Martin and authors Elin Hilderbrand, Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft last December claiming the AI developers drew from large swaths of copyrighted articles to train large language models that enhance the ability of ChatGPT and Copilot to generate text in a variety of styles.
U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein subsequently consolidated the Authors Guild and New York Times’ cases with two others.
Regional newspapers owned by MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing companies filed similar claims in April. Those outlets include Tribune Publishing’s Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel and the New York Daily News, as well as Media News Group-owned Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer-Press.
The Authors Guild and Center for Investigative Reporting have filed also separate lawsuits under similar claims.