OpenAI gets partial win in authors' U.S. copyright lawsuit

A federal judge dismissed parts of a copyright lawsuit brought by comedian Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates and other authors against OpenAI.

A federal judge in California has dismissed parts of a copyright lawsuit brought by comedian Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates and other authors against OpenAI over its alleged use of their books to train the large language model underlying its popular chatbot ChatGPT.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin on Monday granted most of Microsoft-backed OpenAI's motion to dismiss many of the writers' claims for now, rejecting their arguments that the content generated by ChatGPT infringes their copyrights and that the company unjustly enriched itself with their work.

Martinez-Olguin joined other federal judges who have so far rejected allegations that the output of generative AI systems violates the rights of copyright holders whose works were supposedly used to train them.

Courts have not yet addressed the core question of whether tech companies' unauthorised use of material scraped from the internet to train AI infringes copyrights on a massive scale. OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies have said that their AI training is protected by the copyright doctrine of fair use and that the lawsuits threaten the burgeoning AI industry.

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Representatives for the authors and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

Several groups of copyright owners including writers, visual artists and music publishers have sued major tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work to train generative AI systems. The group of authors that includes Silverman, Coates and Chabon sued OpenAI and Meta Platforms over their systems last year.