Authors Call for Dismissal of Duplicate Lawsuits in OpenAI Copyright Infringement Case
Renowned authors, including Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Sarah Silverman, who are embroiled in a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI firm OpenAI, are urging a California court to dismiss similar lawsuits filed in New York by The New York Times (NYT), John Grisham, and others. In a court filing on February 8th, the authors argued that allowing these duplicate lawsuits in different jurisdictions would lead to inconsistent rulings and a misallocation of court resources.
The legal action stems from a lawsuit filed in July 2023 by comedian and author Sarah Silverman, along with Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, against OpenAI’s ChatGPT. They alleged that the AI system’s summaries of their work revealed the use of copyrighted content during training. The plaintiffs from California also claimed that the New York lawsuits were a ploy by OpenAI to seek more favorable conditions after their original litigation schedule was rejected by the Californian court.
Various groups of copyright holders, including writers, visual artists, and music publishers, have taken legal action against tech firms such as OpenAI over alleged misuse of their work for training generative AI systems. OpenAI, alongside Meta and others, argues that their AI training falls within the fair use copyright doctrine, emphasizing transformational use. They draw parallels to legal precedents like Google’s book copying for search, which was deemed fair use in the Authors Guild vs. Google case in 2015.
In September 2023, the Authors Guild, supported by renowned authors George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, George Saunders, and Jonathan Franzen, joined a proposed class-action lawsuit against OpenAI in New York. The New York Times subsequently filed additional complaints, invoking both the U.S. Constitution and the Copyright Act to protect the original journalism of the newspaper.
The authors from California contend that the New York cases closely mirror their own, suggesting that OpenAI is engaging in forum shopping and procedural gamesmanship. They believe that dismissing these duplicate lawsuits is essential to avoid inconsistent rulings and ensure an efficient allocation of court resources.
As the legal battle between renowned authors and OpenAI unfolds, the outcome will have significant implications for the use of copyrighted materials in training AI systems. The conflicting interests of copyright holders and AI developers will continue to raise questions about fair use and the boundaries of transformative use in the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence.
