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Microsoft and OpenAI in Copyright Infringement Lawsuit… Again

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media outlet, chatgpt, media, outlet, openai, microsoft, lawsuit

Three prominent digital media outlets have filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement in the development of artificial intelligence.

  • The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet are suing OpenAI, claiming that the company unlawfully used their journalists’ works to train ChatGPT.
  • This marks the 11th lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft related to AI development.
  • There’s a broader trend of legal scrutiny facing AI companies.

Three prominent digital media outlets are suing OpenAI and Microsoft over their use of copyrighted material in training artificial intelligence (AI).

The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet filed complaints, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully utilized their journalists’ works to develop its AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT.

The lawsuits accuse OpenAI of scraping articles from each digital media outlet without proper attribution or authorization, which violates copyright laws. They claim that ChatGPT was trained on the scraped copyrighted material and then reproduced it without crediting the original authors or sources. The media companies are seeking damages to the effect of $2,500 per violation and demanding the removal of all their rightful copyrighted content from OpenAI’s training datasets.

Raw Story and AlterNet‘s joint lawsuit asserts that OpenAI consciously chose to strip away copyright management information protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. This Act, as stated in the document, “prohibits the removal of author, title, copyright, and terms of use information from protected works where there is reason to know that it would induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal a copyright infringement.” Essentially, they are accusing OpenAI of training ChatGPT to not cite and acknowledge the source of the information it provides the users.

The Intercept lawsuit goes further, naming Microsoft as a co-defendant, as it is a major investor in the AI startup. The lawsuit states that “Defendant Microsoft intentionally removed author, title, copyright notice, and terms of use information from [The Intercept’s] copyrighted works in creating ChatGPT and Bing Copilot training sets.”

OpenAI and Microsoft have yet to comment on the lawsuit. However, it’s not their first rodeo and probably won’t be their last either. In fact, this is the 11th lawsuit against the AI startup and the tech giant over something related to AI development:

I know it looks like OpenAI is the masses’ target, but the truth is that many companies working on AI are getting sued; Meta was also sued over copyright infringement. OpenAI is just a more convenient target, probably due to Microsoft’s name and finances being attached to it. Dogpiling on it might actually finally catch the attention of the high courts to do something about the technology’s development.

The air is heavy with trepidation as everyone awaits what’s to come from these suits. Creators and media outlets hope to preserve their life’s work or at least be compensated for its use in AI model training. Meanwhile, these tech companies want to get away with it without paying a single cent more than they necessarily feel like they must. After all, it’s all in the name of innovation and the prosperity of humankind.

Either way, the sword of Damocles is dangling. Let’s hope that it doesn’t take off our heads before the Senate interferes in this mess.

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