OpenAI Wins Legal Battle As Federal Judge Dismisses Copyright Claims By Sarah Silverman And Other Authors

In a recent development, a federal judge has dismissed most of the claims made by Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and other authors against OpenAI regarding the use of copyrighted books to train its generative artificial intelligence chatbot.

What Happened: U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin dismissed the majority of the lawsuit against OpenAI on Feb. 12. The claims for vicarious copyright infringement, negligence, and unjust enrichment were rejected, reported The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday.

The court explained that the authors failed to cite "any particular output" that is "substantially similar — or similar at all — to their books.” Following this, the authors were allowed to amend their suit, except for a claim for violating California’s unfair competition law. The judge allowed this claim to proceed, suggesting that the company’s use of copyrighted works to train its AI model for profit might be an unfair business practice.

However, the judge sided with OpenAI, stating, "Plaintiffs' allegation that ‘every output of the OpenAI Language Models is an infringing derivative work' is insufficient.”

OpenAI did not move to dismiss a claim for direct copyright infringement.

See Also: Three Sentences That Saved Apple’s Macintosh 1984 Launch And Underlined Steve Jobs’ Leadership

Why It Matters: In 2023, Silverman and other authors sued OpenAI and Meta Platforms META over claims of copyright infringement. They alleged that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA stole information from their books.

Earlier this year, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, denied the need for extensive training data from publishers amid a copyright infringement lawsuit with The New York Times Co. He dismissed the necessity for substantial amounts of training data from the Times, stating that it is generally not the case that AI companies need all the training data.

Read Next: Mark Cuban Swipes At xAI After Elon Musk Directs DEI Fury At Amazon: ‘When Will Grok Be Able To Do Analysis Like This?’

Photo via Shutterstock.