WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California partially dismissed the lawsuit by comedian Sarah Silverman and several other book authors against OpenAI, for violating their copyrights by training AI models ChatGPT3.5 and ChatGPT4 based on their books without consent.
The case initially filed by Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, Richard Kadrey, Paul Tremblay, and Mona Awad, who later left the lawsuit in August, accused OpenAI of direct copyright infringement, vicarious infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA by removing copyright management information, unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment.
However, Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin ruled in favor of OpenAI's motion, filed last summer, by dismissing all the counts except direct copyright infringement and unfair competition. She ordered, 'Assuming the truth of Plaintiffs' allegations, that Defendants used Plaintiffs' copyrighted works to train their language models for commercial profit. The Court concludes that Defendants' conduct may constitute an unfair practice. Therefore, this portion of the UCL claim may proceed'.
Speaking on the copyright infringement, Martinez-Olguin commented that, 'Nowhere in plaintiffs' complaint do they allege that defendants reproduced and distributed copies of their books.' Therefore, the plaintiffs' claim of pirating their works could not be upheld against OpenAI, unless they 'show a substantial similarity between the outputs and the copyrighted materials.'
The judge also hinted that the unfair competition claim might be pre-empted by the federal Copyright Act. The Court is also indecisive about whether using copyrighted work to train AI models falls under copyright law's fair use principle.
The judge advised the plaintiffs to amend the lawsuit and re-file it by March 13.
Silverman had earlier filed a similar case against Meta Platforms's (META) large language model Llama 2, of which the copyright infringement claim is currently under the discovery phase, whereas the other subordinate claims were dismissed by the judge.
Similarly, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is facing copyright lawsuits from The Authors Guild, The New York Times, and well-known authors like George R.R. Martin and John Grisham.
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