New York Judge Keeps Key Aspects of Suit Against OpenAI Alive

A Friday ruling from the U.S. District court for the Southern District of New York found in favor of news organizations including the New York Times Company on several points, but granted defendants OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s motions to dismiss on others, in the landmark cases about whether OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) infringe the news organizations’ copyrights.

The New York Times (the Times) case was brought in late December 2023 against OpenAI’s LLM, ChatGPT, as well as Microsoft’s GPT-4-powered Bing Chat, alleging that Microsoft and OpenAI reproduce Times content verbatim and also often attribute false information to it. OpenAI filed a motion to dismiss the suit, which in part alleged that The Times paid someone to target and exploit “a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) by using deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.” The Times responded by calling the accusation “as irrelevant as it is false,” pointing the court to its Exhibit J to the complaint, which explains that The Times elicited the infringing content from OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, by prompting it with the first few words or sentences of Times articles.

In Friday’s order, the New York court denied:

(1) OpenAI’s motions to dismiss the direct infringement claims involving conduct occurring more than three years before the complaints were filed;

(2) the defendants’ motions to dismiss the contributory copyright infringement claims; and

(3) the defendants’ motions to dismiss the state and federal trademark dilution claims in the Daily News action.

However, the court did grant the defendants’ motions to dismiss the common law unfair competition by misappropriation claims and OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the “abridgment” claims in the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) action against it, both with prejudice.

Finally, the court granted Microsoft’s motions to dismiss Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) claims against it under 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b)(1) in all three actions, OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the 1202(b)(1) claims against it in The New York Times’ suit against it, and the defendants’ motions to dismiss the 1202(b)(3) claims against them in all three actions, and dismissed each claim without prejudice. The court denied OpenAI’s motions to dismiss the section 1202(b)(1) claims against it in the Daily News and CIR actions.

Judge Sidney Stein said in part that the plaintiffs’ numerous examples “of allegedly infringing outputs at the pleading stage—including more than 100 pages of examples provided in Exhibit J to the Times complaint, and dozens of examples in Exhibit J to the Daily News complaint—combined with their allegations of ‘widely publicized’ instances of copyright infringement by end users of defendants’ products, give rise to a plausible inference of copyright infringement by third parties.”

Furthermore, Stein rejected OpenAI’s arguments that some of the infringement claims were time barred under the statute because the alleged infringements occurred more than three years before the filing of the complaints – in December 2023 by The Times and April 2024 by the Daily News plaintiffs. He said “OpenAI has not met its burden of establishing that The Times and the Daily News plaintiffs discovered, or with due diligence should have discovered, the alleged infringement before December 27, 2020 and April 30, 2021 respectively.”

The Times and Daily News have said in various statements to the press that the ruling does not undermine the key aspects of the lawsuits and the companies will continue to pursue all of their copyright claims against Microsoft and OpenAI.

Image Source: Deposit Photos
Author: Skorzewiak
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