Authors suing OpenAI seek dismissal of copycat lawsuits in New York

Authors such as Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Sarah Silverman, suing artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI for copyright infringement, have urged a California court to dismiss parallel lawsuits filed by The New York Times (NYT), John Grisham, and others in New York.

In a court document filed on Thursday, Feb. 8, they argued that permitting the “copycat” lawsuits, which include the Times’ case and a prior one initiated by the Authors Guild on behalf of Grisham, Franzen, Martin, and other authors, would lead to “inconsistent rulings in overlapping class actions” and be a misuse of the courts’ resources.

The American comedian and author Sarah Silverman, along with two other authors, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI’s ChatGPT over copyright infringement. In the July 2023 lawsuit, they alleged that when ChatGPT generates summaries of the plaintiffs’ work, it indicates the training via copyrighted content.

The group of California plaintiffs, with legal representation that includes attorney Joseph Saveri, also claimed that the New York lawsuits enabled OpenAI to participate in “forum shopping” and engage in “procedural gamesmanship.”

The authors in California informed the court that the New York cases closely resemble their own, suggesting that OpenAI is seeking more favorable conditions in New York following the California court’s rejection of its proposed litigation schedule.

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Several groups of copyright owners, including writers, visual artists and music publishers, have sued significant tech companies like Microsoft-backed OpenAI over the alleged misuse of their work to train generative artificial intelligence systems.

OpenAI, Meta, and other companies argue that their AI training is considered "transformative ” and within the fair use copyright doctrine. Meta pointed out that it is akin to legal precedents, such as Google’s book copying for search, deemed fair use in Authors Guild v. Google, Inc.

In September, a New York-based professional organization for published writers led by the Authors Guild, including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen, joined a proposed class-action lawsuit against OpenAI due to its alleged misuse of copyrighted material in the training of its AI models.

This was followed by additional complaints by The New York Times. The lawsuit pulled from both the United States Constitution and the Copyright Act to defend the original journalism of the NYT.

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