Sarah Silverman's lawsuit against OpenAI will move forward and some of her legal team's claims will be dismissed. The comedian sued OpenAI and Meta in July 2023, alleging that they trained her ai models on her books and other works without consent. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that the unfair competition portion of the lawsuit will proceed. Judge Martínez-Olguín gave the plaintiffs until March 13 to modify the lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín on Monday dismissed parts of the complaint filed by Silverman's legal team, including negligence, unjust enrichment, DMCA violations and allegations of indirect infringement. The main claim of the case remains intact. She alleges that OpenAI directly infringed copyrighted material by training LLM on millions of books without permission.
OpenAI's motion to dismiss, tech-policy/2023/08/openai-disputes-authors-claims-that-every-chatgpt-response-is-a-derivative-work/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank” data-ylk=”slk:filed;elm:context_link;elmt:doNotAffiliate;cpos:3;pos:1;itc:0;sec:content-canvas”>archived in August, it did not address the case's main copyright claims. Although the lawsuit will continue, the judge suggested that federal Copyright Law may prevail over the lawsuit's remaining claims. “As OpenAI does not raise the preference, the Court does not consider it,” Martínez-Olguín wrote.
The US court system has yet to determine whether the training of ai long language models on copyrighted works falls under the fair use doctrine. Last month, OpenAI admitted in a court filing that it would be “impossible to train today's leading ai models without using copyrighted materials.”
The outcome of Silverman's OpenAI hearing is similar to one in San Francisco in November, when Silverman's claims against Meta were also ai-model-gets-trimmed” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank” data-ylk=”slk:slashed;elm:context_link;elmt:doNotAffiliate;cpos:6;pos:1;itc:0;sec:content-canvas”>chopped up to major copyright infringement claims. In that session, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria described some of the plaintiffs' dismissed claims as “meaningless.”
Other groups suing OpenAI for alleged copyright violations include The New York Times, a collection of nonfiction authors (a group that grew after the initial lawsuit), and The Author's Guild. The latter filed his lawsuit along with authors George RR Martin (game of Thrones) and John Grisham.
