AI/Copyright Lawsuit Roundup: 1) “AI Company Can Seek Fast Appeal in Copyright Battle With Thomson Reuters, Judge Rules”; 2) “Judge Calls Out OpenAI’s ‘Straw Man’ Argument in New York Times Copyright Suit”; 3) US Authors’ Copyright Lawsuits Against Openai and Microsoft Combined In New York With Newspaper Actions

Three entries.

1) AI Company Can Seek Fast Appeal in Copyright Battle With Thomson Reuters, Judge Rules

Artificial Intelligence company Ross Intelligence can immediately ask an appeals court to review a ruling that it infringed copyright by training its legal research service on material published by the competing service Westlaw, owned by Thomson Reuters, a federal judge said Friday.

“I recognize that there are substantial grounds for difference of opinion on controlling legal issues in this case,” Judge Stephanos Bibas in Delaware wrote in an order issued Friday. “These issues have the potential to change the shape of the trial.”

Direct to Full Text Article (via Media Post)

2) Judge Calls Out OpenAI’s “Straw Man” Argument in New York Times Copyright Suit

After The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023—alleging that ChatGPT outputs violate copyrights by regurgitating news articles—the ChatGPT maker tried and failed to argue that the claims were time-barred.

According to OpenAI, the NYT should have known that ChatGPT was being trained on its articles and raised its lawsuit in 2020, partly because of the newspaper’s own reporting. To support this, OpenAI pointed to a single November 2020 article, where the NYT reported that OpenAI was analyzing a trillion words on the Internet. But on Friday, US district judge Sidney Stein disagreed, denying OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the NYT’s copyright claims partly based on one NYT journalist’s reporting.

In his opinion, Stein confirmed that it’s OpenAI’s burden to prove that the NYT knew that ChatGPT would potentially violate its copyrights two years prior to its release in November 2022. And so far, OpenAI has not met that burden.

“The fact that one of The Times’s reporters discussed OpenAI’s” AI training fails to make it clear that the newspaper knew that ChatGPT outputs years later could possibly regurgitate the NYT’s reporting, Stein explained.

Direct to Full Text Article (via Ars Technica)

3) US Authors’ Copyright Lawsuits Against OpenAI and Microsoft Combined in New York With Newspaper Actions (via The Guardian)

Twelve US copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft have been consolidated in New York, despite most of the authors and news outlets suing the companies being opposed to centralisation.

A transfer order made by the US judicial panel on multidistrict litigation on Thursday said that centralisation will “allow a single judge to coordinate discovery, streamline pretrial proceedings, and eliminate inconsistent rulings”.

Direct to Full Text Article

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