I. General information
Date of Judgement: 07.11.2024
Issuing Authority: United States District Court – Southern District of New York
Category: Copyright – Copyright infringement of AI training data
Plaintiff/Appellant: RAW STORY MEDIA, Inc., ALTERNET MEDIA, INC.
Defendant/Respondent: OPENAI, INC., OPENAI GP, LLC, OPEN AI, LLC, OPENAI OPCO LLC, OPENAI GLOBAL LLC, & OPENAI HOLDINGS,LLC
Keyworks: AI; text mining; data mining; training data; damage; DMCA; U.S
II. Dispute
The lawsuit between Raw Story Media, Inc., AlterNet Media, Inc., and OpenAI concerns allegations by these media organizations that OpenAI used thousands of their articles to train its ChatGPT AI model without permission, without payment, and without attribution.
Specifically, the plaintiffs argued that OpenAI removed copyright management information (CMI) such as author names, article titles, and copyright notices from their articles when using them to train ChatGPT, violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
III. Legal basis
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) - Section 1202(b)(1) of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act);
United States Constitution
IV. Judgement
On November 7, 2024, Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District Court of New York dismissed the lawsuit, stating that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated specific damages caused by OpenAI's actions. The court emphasized that the likelihood of ChatGPT generating verbatim responses from the plaintiffs' articles was very low due to the enormous amount of data in its repository.
V. Remark
This case reflects the growing trend of media organizations and individuals protecting their copyright interests regarding the use of data for AI training.
