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“I am not convinced that injury for interference with property provides the necessary ‘close historical or common-law analogue’ to Plaintiffs’ alleged injury.”- District Court opinion
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, November 7, dismissed a copyright infringement complaint filed by Raw Story Media and Alternet Media against OpenAI, holding that the news outlets lacked Article III standing to bring their claims. However, the court left open the possibility for the sites to file an amended complaint.
The complaint alleged that “thousands” of the news outlets’ copyrighted articles were scraped from the internet and then “stripped of their author, title, and copyright information, and input into at least three of OpenAI’s training sets (WebText, WebText2, and Common Crawl)” and then used to train OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT. The responses provided by ChatGPT thus included information gleaned from the copyrighted works without noting the source. The news sites also argued that the removal of copyright management information (CMI) prior to training ChatGPT constituted a violation under Section 1202(b)(i) of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). They also sought an injunction to stop OpenAI from generating infringing responses to users via the current version of ChatGPT. OpenAI countered that the news sites lacked Article III standing to pursue either of their claims and that the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction.
The news outlets said the removal of CMI from a copyrighted work constitutes a concrete injury and that the injunction was warranted because there was “substantial risk” that the new version of ChatGPT would generate the copyright-protected works” verbatim or nearly verbatim.” But OpenAI argued that “neither theory of harm identifies a concrete injury-in-fact sufficient to establish standing” and the court agreed.
First, the court said the plaintiffs failed to “allege that a copy of their work from which the CMI has been removed has been disseminated by ChatGPT to anyone in response to any specific query.” While the news outlets argued that the removal of CMI is akin to copyright infringement and generally constitutes interference with property, which Is recognized under common law as a concrete injury, the district court judge wrote, “I am not convinced that injury for interference with property provides the necessary ‘close historical or common-law analogue’ to Plaintiffs’ alleged injury.” The court said the plaintiffs improperly read Section 1202, which only protects against “specified interferences with the integrity of a work’s CMI,” and does not outright prohibit reproductions or derivatives of the work. “I am not convinced that the mere removal of identifying information from a copyrighted work-absent dissemination- has any historical or common-law analogue,” wrote the court. Because the copyrighted works with the CMI removed “were used to train an AI-software program and remain in ChatGPT’s repository of text,” the news outlets failed to show any “actual adverse effects stemming from this alleged DMCA violation,” added the opinion. Thus, they failed to prove the requisite Article III standing to seek damages.
As to injunctive relief, which sought to have OpenAI “remove all copies of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works from which author, title, copyright, and terms of use information w[ ere] removed from their training sets and any other repositories,” the court said the plaintiffs had failed to show the information in their articles was copyrighted per se. “Given the quantity of information contained in the repository, the likelihood that ChatGPT would output plagiarized content from one of Plaintiffs’ articles seems remote,” wrote the court. While the news outlets submitted evidence showing earlier versions of ChatGPT did output plagiarized content, “Plaintiffs have not plausibly alleged that there is a ‘substantial risk’ that the current version of ChatGPT will generate a response plagiarizing one of Plaintiffs’ articles.”
However, the opinion did acknowledge that there may be some legitimate way for the plaintiffs to argue relief due to OpenAI’s “use of Plaintiffs’ articles to develop ChatGPT without compensation to Plaintiffs,” even though that question was not before the court here. The judge allowed for a proposed amended pleading to be filed in conjunction with “an explanation of why the proposed amendment would not be futile.”
Image Source: Deposit Photos
Author: pasoderholm
Image ID: 3063887
