A week after the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, two journalists and nonfiction writers Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Ngagoyeanes, who wrote under the name Nicholas Gage for both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have filed a somewhat similar copyright lawsuit against the same companies, although this time asking for a class action.
This lawsuit brings the total number of copyright lawsuits related to AI technology to 16 in the United States.
One big difference with the Basbanes’ Complaint is that it alleges infringement by OpenAI and Microsoft in what are often referred to as training copies (i.e., the materials used to train large language models) (Par. 140 “Defendant’s violation of Plaintiffs’ and Proposed Class Members’ exclusive rights was willful because Defendants knew the datasets on which it “trained” its large language models contained copyrighted works.”), but, unlike the other copyright lawsuits, does not allege infringement in the output of works substantially similar to the plaintiffs’ writings.
The Complaint does not appear to identify he allegations showing how specific works the defendants allegedly copied or used, although the copyright registrations for their works’ allegedly infringed are listed in Exhibit A. The Complaint alleges:
138. Defendants had access to Plaintiffs’ and Proposed Class Members’ copyrighted works, including by way of the various unauthorized datasets discussed above.
139. Defendants violated Plaintiffs’ and Proposed Class Members’ exclusive rights by reproducing their copyrighted works in copies for the purpose of “training” their LLMs and ChatGPT.
You can download the Complaint below.
The plaintiffs are represented by Michael P. Richter and Bryan M. Goldstein of Grant Herrmann Schwartz & Klinger LLP.