Over the past few months, many news and media outlets have sued AI developers over copyright infringement related to allegations that tech companies train their large language model chatbots on protected works. Unlike most organizations, who have filed straightforward copyright claims, two media companies –The Intercept Media and Raw Story Media sued OpenAI, alleging OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) thereby, crafting an alternative legal theory for their case. Let’s get into the details.
Background
Microsoft-backed tech company OpenAI is back in the legal spotlight and facing more allegations of copyright infringement –this time from two media news outlets. The two lawsuits, both filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleged that “thousands of the outlets’ articles were used to train ChatGPT to respond to human prompts and that the chatbot reproduces their copyrighted material verbatim or nearly verbatim when prompted.”
The news outlets seek $2,500 per violation in monetary damages and a court order to prevent OpenAI from misusing the protected works to train their chatbot. Plaintiffs included Microsoft as one of the defendants in the action. The CEO of Intercept –one of the news outlets suing, stated that the lawsuit is intended to send a “strong message to AI developers who chose to ignore our copyrights and free ride on the hard work of our journalists.” Previous blog posts have delved into AI tech company lawyers putting forth the fair use doctrine as a defense against copyright infringement claims.
Alternate Legal Theory to Circumvent Fair Use Argument
According to Reuters reporting, the Intercept and Raw Story lawsuits are based on a 1998 federal statute that “prohibits the removal of information that can help copyright holders detect infringement, including article titles, author names, and copyright dates.”
Specifically, the two media companies alleged that OpenAI intentionally stripped important copyright information out of training materials “so that ChatGPT’s responses to user prompts would create the impression that it is an all-knowing, intelligent source of information being provided” when, in reality, plaintiffs argue, the responses provided by the chatbot are actually “based on copyrighted works of journalism that ChatGPT simply mimics.”
Lawyers for the Plaintiff News Outlets released a public statement arguing that their “DMCA theory offers an alternative path to recovery that does not require news organizations to shell out money to register their copyrights.” According to plaintiffs’ lawyers, their DMCA legal theory allows them “to circumvent a primary defense argument in copyright cases against AI developers, namely: that AI training materials make fair use of copyrighted content to create new products that do more than simply recreate the protected works.”
Plaintiff’s lawyers believe that claiming DMCA violations over traditional infringement allows them to counter a fair use doctrine-based defense – arguing it is inapplicable under this statute. However, Plaintiffs will still face a hurdle in court even under this legal theory as according to reports “OpenAI and other artificial intelligence developers have previously addressed DMCA allegations in other cases –and have persuaded judges in two California suits to curtail the claims.”
OpenAI defense attorneys assert that OpenAI did not deliberately strip copyright-identifying information from the content that trained their AI models and that the DMCA statute requires plaintiffs to “prove that defendants intentionally deleted identifying information to make it harder for copyright holders to track infringement.” Whether plaintiffs can overcome these hurdles in a New York courtroom is yet to be seen. Though these two lawsuits are not the first to allege DMCA violations against OpenAI, according to reports– “they appear to be the first to allege only DMCA violations.”
How Might this Suit Impact Other AI-Related Lawsuits?
Over the past several months, OpenAI and other tech companies have been entrenched in copyright lawsuits filed by creators, including “authors, visual artists and music publishers over the data used to train their generative AI systems.” Perhaps this new approach to combat copyright infringement and prevent OpenAI from using proprietary information will offer a way forward for those seeking compensation for the use of their protected works in the training of AI models.
As A.I. technology continues to advance, the practice of copyright law will inevitably adapt, as courts and legislators work to refine the balance of protecting content creators’ protected works without hampering the development of A.I. technology. Be sure to check back with our Blog as we continue to keep an eye on these and other cases.
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Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/28/media-outlets-sue-openai-copyright-infringement
Music: Disruptor’s Dance by Anka Mason
Blog Narration: Anka Mason
