Judge dismisses media case against OpenAI

A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet, which accused OpenAI abusing their copyrighted content to train the ChatGPT AI language model.

On Nov. 7, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in New York granted OpenAI’s request to dismiss the complaint in its entirety, saying the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate the specific harm necessary to obtain standing under Article 3 of the U.S. Constitution.

The decision marks one of the first major legal victories for the artificial intelligence company, which has faced allegations of copyright infringement from news publishers.

Newsweek contacted OpenAI and the publisher of both Raw Story and AlterNet by email for comment.

“Plaintiffs have failed to allege any actual adverse consequences caused by this alleged violation of the DMCA,” McMahon wrote in her decision. “No specific damage, no position.”

She added that the plaintiffs did not provide specific examples of ChatGPT reproducing their copyrighted content without attribution, making it “remote.”

The main allegations in the lawsuit

Raw Story Media, Inc., which owns both Raw Story and AlterNet, filed the lawsuit on February 28, 2024. The complaint alleged that OpenAI violated Section 1202(b)(1) of the Digital Copyright Act by removing copyright management information (CMI), such as author names, article titles, and copyright notices, from thousands of his articles during the ChatGPT training .

Raw Story claimed that this removal of CMI taught ChatGPT to generate responses that did not acknowledge copyright or properly cite the source, effectively facilitating plagiarism. They sought at least $2,500 in damages for infringement and an injunction requiring OpenAI to remove their work from its training datasets.

“Raw Story’s copyrighted journalism is the result of significant efforts by the human journalists who report the news,” Raw Story publisher Roxanne Cooper said in February. “Instead of licensing this work, OpenAI trained ChatGPT to ignore journalists’ copyrights and hide their use of copyrighted material.”

“It’s time for news organizations to push back against Big Tech’s continued attempts to monetize other people’s work,” Raw Story CEO and founder John Byrne said at the time.

“For 20 years, Raw Story has spent millions of dollars helping Americans make important decisions about their leaders and their lives. Big technology has destroyed journalism. It’s time for publishers to take a stand,” he added.

McMahon’s response in favor of OpenAI

In her ruling, McMahon agreed with OpenAI’s argument that Raw Story and AlterNet’s lawsuit lacked standing because it did not allege specific harm caused by the alleged DMCA violation. She said the plaintiffs had not demonstrated any actual adverse effects or substantial risk of future harm.

“Given the amount of information contained in the repository, the likelihood that ChatGPT will infer plagiarism from one of plaintiffs’ articles appears remote,” the judge wrote. “Plaintiffs have nowhere claimed that the information in their articles is copyrighted, nor could they have done so.”

“And while Plaintiffs provide third-party statistics indicating that the previous version of ChatGPT generated responses that contained a significant amount of plagiarism, Plaintiffs have not credibly argued that there is a “substantial risk” that the current version of ChatGPT will generate responses that contain plagiarism . articles of the plaintiffs,” she added.

The judge also said the plaintiffs’ real complaint was the unlicensed use of their articles to develop ChatGPT without compensation, not the removal of CMI. “Let’s be clear about what’s really at stake here,” she said.

Despite being fired, Raw Story and AlterNet have an opportunity to make a comeback. McMahon expressed skepticism about their ability to allege tangible harm caused by OpenAI, but was open to an amended complaint.

“We really intend to proceed,” Byrne said. “We are confident that we will be able to address the court’s concerns in the amended complaint.”

Matt Topik, a partner at Loevy & Loevy, the law firm representing Raw Story Media, told Reuters, “(we are) confident that we will be able to address the concerns identified by the court with the amended complaint.”

Implications for Other AI Copyright Cases

“We build our AI models using publicly available data in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and based on longstanding and well-established legal precedents,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in response to the judge’s decision.

The company argued that the plaintiffs did not provide evidence that ChatGPT learned from their material or that any harm was caused as a result. OpenAI claims that its use of publicly available data is legal and subject to fair use.

The dismissal could have broader implications for other copyright cases involving artificial intelligence companies and content creators. OpenAI and other tech firms are now facing a wave of lawsuits from authors, artists, music publishers and news organizations over the data used to train their generative AI systems.

In particular, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December 2023, claiming that “millions” of his articles had been used without permission to teach ChatGPT.

The case has since been consolidated with lawsuits filed in April 2024 by eight publications owned by Alden Global Capital, including the New York Daily news. Publishers are currently searching OpenAI’s training database in a secure environment to find instances of their copyrighted work being used.

“We’ve spent billions of dollars collecting information and publishing news in our publications, and we can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand Big Tech’s games of stealing our work to build their own business at our expense,” Frank Pine, executive editor of Alden’s Newspapers. said in a statement at the time.

Ultimately, McMahon’s ruling against Raw Story’s complaint, while skeptical of publishers’ ability to demonstrate specific damages, leaves open the possibility that other legal theories might better address the fundamental issue of compensation for content used in AI training. “Whether there is another statute or legal theory that raises this type of harm remains to be seen,” she wrote.