Judge Chhabria rained on the parade of the copyright owner who sought to sue the entire U.S. AI industry, in an omnibus copyright suit against 8 different AI companies:
- Anthropic
- OpenAI
- Meta
- xAI (Elon Musk’s company)
- Perplexity AI
- Apple
- NVIDIA
In Chicken Soup for the Soul v. Anthropic, Judge Chhabria sua sponte severed the defendants due to improper joinder and dismissed the lawsuit against seven of the eight defendants, even before any defendant had a chance to file such a motion.
But the joint stipulation between the plaintiff and OpenAI to sever that portion of the lawsuit for transfer to the MDL case against OpenAI alerted Judge Chhabria to the scope of the plaintiff’s lawsuit.
Judge Chhabria didn’t like the taste of what Chicken Soup for the Soul was serving, and severed and then dismissed the lawsuit for separate filings.
But he kept the portion against Meta as a related case to Kadrey v. Meta, over which he presides.
We should expect the same thing will happen to the Cambronne v. Anthropic lawsuit before Judge Pitts.
This means that the number of U.S. copyright lawsuits, now at 100, will likely increase to 114 lawsuits!
It also means we will not see Sam Altman and Elon Musk on the same side!
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