Authors sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

One of several lawsuits filed for similar reasons comes at a tumultuous time after OpenAI founder Sam Altman was abruptly fired last week and returned recently.

A group of authors filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly infringing their copyrights by training ChatGPT chatbots in their written works and scientific journals without their consent. As OpenAI concluded a tumultuous 5-day period by reinstating Sam Altman as OpenAI's CEO, one of many accusations filed against the AI platform provider came after the OpenAI CEO took over as OpenAI's CEO. His return was met with support from employees, investors, and affiliates after he was fired by the company's board of directors last week. Julian Sancton, a New York Times bestselling author, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of blatantly ignoring copyright laws for their own economic gain.

"OpenAI and Microsoft have built a business worth tens of billions of dollars on the misappropriation of human works," reads the complaint filed by Susman Godfrey LLP. "Instead of paying for intellectual property, we pretend there is no copyright law." The complaint cites the years of development, research, and writing that authors have put into their work, and OpenAI is using them without their permission as a basis for copyright infringement. For example, Julian Sancton spent 5 years and tens of thousands of dollars traveling the world to complete the research for his bestseller, the complaint says.

The copyright law was supposed to protect him from these risks.

At the same time, his best-selling book is included in the dataset used to train ChatGPT, and excerpts from the book and "a large array of copyrighted material" show that Xu "while training the model, defendant is unaware of what copyright law is trying to protect - style, word choice, placement, presentation, etc. - The expressions contained therein. "We copy copyrighted works in order to use the elements accurately," the lawsuit says."

"In addition, OpenAI is expensive, but neither OpenAI nor Microsoft compensates the author's intellectual property," the plaintiffs claim, so OpenAI and its underlying platform are "nothing more than rampant theft of copyrighted works," the complaint says. The plaintiffs are seeking damages that would prohibit the defendants from permanently enjoining the infringement of their rights. Neither Microsoft nor OpenAI responded to individual requests for comment.

A breakthrough case

This lawsuit is not the first to raise objections to the use of copyrighted data on ChatGPT and other OpenAI-based platforms. But so far, the judge has not supported the artist or creator, despite the fact that he has opened the door to this possibility. This lawsuit is also one of the few that names Microsoft as a defendant alongside OpenAI. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, the technology that enhances Bing's chatbots, and OpenAI uses Microsoft exclusively as its cloud computing partner. At the same time, the two companies are competitors - OpenAI licenses its technology to other companies - not to mention a fierce battle for CEO status in the last 1 week.

In another class action lawsuit filed against graphic service providers Stability AI, Midjourney, and DevianArt, a U.S. district judge ruled that it was "impossible" to determine whether the images created constituted direct copyright infringement. However, in response to a motion filed by the image processing service provider that was denied by the judge, the plaintiffs filed their complaint on how the companies violated copyright laws.

Another class action lawsuit challenges the legitimacy of GitHub, as the co-pilot of an artificial intelligence programming assistant was trained on the public GitHub repository. The authors, who published the code on GitHub under an open source license, claim that the technology violates their rights. The decision will be filed with the US District Court in San Francisco on behalf of millions of aspiring programmers.