IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: Lawsuits over ChatGPT continue to pile up, (Jun 28, 2024)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The Center for Investigative Reporting is the latest news organization to take on the well-known large language model.

The companies behind ChatGPT purloined copyright material owned by a nonprofit news organization and used it to train its generative large language model, a new federal lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit, the latest in a growing body of litigation to be filed against generative AI companies by media outlets, alleges that OpenAI not only copied its work but also regurgitated its content in response to user queries—and stripped off identifying information while doing so (Center for Investigative Reporting, Inc. v. OpenAI, Inc., No. 1:24-cv-04872 (S.D.N.Y. June 27, 2024)).

The lawsuit was brought by the Center for Investigative Reporting, a national nonprofit news organization that produces the Mother Jones magazine and website as well as the Reveal radio show and podcast. The Center in its current form is the product of a recent merger between Mother Jones—founded in 1976 by Adam Hochschild, publishing executive Richard Parker, and others—and the Center for Investigative Reporting—founded in 1977 by news reporters Dan Noyes, David Weir, and Lowell Bergman (the latter famously portrayed by Al Pacino in Hollywood thriller The Insider).

The lawsuit takes aim at ChatGPT, the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence program that was among the first of its kind to reach the widespread public on its release last year. The so-called large language model, the lawsuit asserts, was built by ingesting a wide range of copyrighted content—including the text from thousands of different URLs belonging to Mother Jones and over 400 belonging to Reveal. In harvesting these materials, the lawsuit contends, OpenAI’s algorithm automatically removed the author, title, copyright notice, and terms of use information from those websites.

But this allegedly unlicensed ingestion of materials, the lawsuit contends, was only the beginning. “At least some of the time,” the lawsuit contends, “ChatGPT memorizes and regurgitates material.” The news organization attached to the complaint an exhibit showing three examples in which the ChatGPT output was ostensibly identical, on a nearly word-for-word basis, to the wording of Mother Jones articles. Another exhibit shows how ChatGPT has allegedly “abridged” certain Mother Jones articles to a level of detail that infringes on “the originality of their authors in selecting, arranging, and presenting facts to tell compelling stories.”

The Center’s lawsuit is only one of several lawsuits against Microsoft and OpenAI by news organizations. The New York Times was the first major news organization to strike, filing a lawsuit just on the eve of the new year in the Manhattan federal court. The Daily News followed suit a few months later, also in Manhattan. (Briefing is currently underway on motions to dismiss and motions to consolidate the two cases.) The companies behind ChatGPT are also fending off lawsuits from the Authors Guild, as well as prominent individual authors such as Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kai Bird, among others.

The lawsuit asserts claims of direct and secondary copyright infringement, as well as violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in connection with the alleged stripping of copyright information.

The Case is No. 1:24-cv-04872.

Attorneys: Stephen Stich Match (Loevy + Loevy) for The Center for Investigative Reporting, Inc.

Companies: The Center for Investigative Reporting, Inc.; OpenAI, Inc.

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