US District Court Judge Colleen McMahon has dismissed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. McMahon’s decision, announced Thursday, is a win not just for OpenAI, but for everyone who benefits from ChatGPT and similar programs.
Raw Story Media and AlterNet Media filed the suit in February, complaining that OpenAI used their articles to train ChatGPT and that the bot “broke out.”[s] verbatim or nearly verbatim copyrighted journalistic works.” The plaintiffs alleged that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by removing copyright management information (authorship and title) from articles used to train ChatGPT.
McMahon disagreed with the plaintiffs. She rejected their claim for damages because she had not specified “any damages whatsoever.” factual adverse consequences arising from this alleged DMCA violation”; without concrete damage, she wrote, there can be no status. She also noted that while content may be copyrightable, mere information is not. There is no substantial risk that ChatGPT will violate the DMCA, she wrote , because “given the amount of information in the repository, the likelihood that ChatGPT would publish plagiarized content from any of Plaintiffs’ articles appears remote.”
McMahon’s decision could set a precedent The New York Times’ There is a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, for using millions of their articles to train ChatGPT. The Times The lawsuit, filed last year, demands the “destruction” of every major language model and training package “in which[s] Times Works.” The next hearing in that case is scheduled for December 3, 2024.
Jen Sidorova—a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website—points out that artificial intelligence “is merely scaling what researchers have done with data for decades. The ethical landscape has not changed; it’s the business model that needs updating. “
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