More news organizations sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement

Legal claims are starting to pile up against Microsoft and OpenAI, as three more news sites have sued the firms over copyright infringement, The Verge reported. The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet filed separate lawsuits accusing ChatGPT of reproducing news content “verbatim or nearly verbatim” while stripping out important attribution like the author’s name.

The sites, all represented by the same law firm, said that if ChatGPT trained on copyright material, it “would have learned to communicate that information when providing responses.” Raw Story and AlterNet added that OpenAI and Microsoft must have known that the chatbot would be less popular and generate lower revenue if “users believed that ChatGPT responses violated third-party copyrights.”

The news organizations note in the lawsuit that OpenAI offers an opt-out system for website owners, meaning that the company must be aware of potential copyright infringement. Microsoft and OpenAI have also said that they’ll defend customers against legal claims around copyright infringement that might arise from using their products, and even pay for incurred costs.

Late last year, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, saying it “seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages”. OpenAI asked a court to dismiss that claim, saying the NYT took advantage of a ChatGPT bug that made it recite articles word for word.

The companies also face lawsuits from multiple non-fiction authors accusing them of “massive and deliberate theft of copyrighted works,” and by comedian Sarah Silverman over similar claims.