AI

New York District Court Judge Sidney H. Stein’s ruling allowing a trial to proceed on authors’ allegations that ChatGPT infringes copyright found that the LLM’s outputs include “such copyrightable elements of plaintiffs’ original works as plot, setting, and characters.” In denying OpenAI’s motion to dismiss, he determined that the author plaintiffs cleared the bar of having “alleged some outputs that a reasonable jury could find are substantially similar to plaintiffs’ works.” Judge Stein’s analysis of both summaries of books by George R.R. Martin and AI-generated outlines for sequels to those books “convey[s] the overall tone and feel of the original […]

A judge in the Southern District of New York denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss a consolidated class action suit over ChatGPT. The suit combines lawsuits from authors including Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sarah Silverman, Kai Bird, and Victor LaValle, as well as the Authors Guild, alleging that ChatGPT’s outputs are similar to the authors’ work and constitute copyright infringement. Judge Sidney H. Stein determined that the plaintiffs’ argument is strong enough to go to trial. In trying to dismiss, OpenAI argued that ChatGPT summarizing books is the same as summarizing news articles, which “the court determined were not substantially similar to […]

In keeping with the court’s deadlines, plaintiffs’ counsel and Anthropic filed numerous additional materials on Tuesday. The attachments here show the proposed Claim Form and the proposed Long-Form Notice that will be sent to potential claimants explaining the settlement. Additionally, the attorneys filed their answers to Judge William Alsup’s 34 additional questions — many of which were already answered by the proposed plan of allocation filed on Monday. In those answers, we learn that the final corrected works list contains 482,460 works. They confirm that for any unclaimed work, those funds will be redistributed among all of the actual claimants. On […]

The author plaintiffs submitted details to District Court Judge William Alsup proposing a notification and claims process in the hopes that the judge approves the $1.5 billion Anthropic copyright infringement settlement. Those plans, to be followed today by written answers to Judge Alsup’s 34 detailed questions, were filed ahead of the September 25 hearing, and supported by letters from a wide variety of author and publisher organizations and literary agencies. The filing notes, “The parties have worked around the clock since the Court’s initial preliminary approval hearing on September 8 to address the remaining issues the Court raised at that […]

Further to Monday’s surprise hearing, when Northern California District Court Judge William Alsup declined to provide preliminary approval for the Anthropic copyright infringement settlement due in part to “important questions to be answered in the future,” he issued a new order on Wednesday. That order provides the parties with 17 questions to address with “complete and succinct written answers” by September 23, ahead of the next hearing on the settlement. Judge Alsup poses a variety of complex “scenarios,” regarding everything from disputed or conflicted claims on the same work; works with multiple authors; and works where a third-party like a […]