Judge Dismisses Suit Against OpenAI
The Facts
A federal judge Thursday dismissed a suit from two news organizations — Raw Story and AlterNet — against artificial intelligence company OpenAI, ruling the outlets were unable to show injury.
The outlets in February sued OpenAI, claiming it fed their articles into ChatGPT after removing copyright management information from the content in order to train its large language models.
The Spin
This is a major legal victory for OpenAI and all companies training their large language models. It's also a warning against those who want to sue these companies, as the judge in this case has made it clear plaintiffs better be able to show they've been injured and aren't just trying to get compensation for something that's not taking place. Moving forward, suing for violations of Section 1202 (b) of the DMCA may be unavailable to content creators.
OpenAI and its competitors aren't out of the woods yet. Even if suing for a violation of the DMCA may be a challenging path, there's still plenty of straight copyright violation going on with these companies and several content creators, including large outlets like The New York Times. Eventually, these companies will have to compensate those whose work they're using to train their models while accumulating large sums of revenue.
