Last month, in the New York-based class action lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement, Judge Ona T. Wang ordered the tech company to turn over internal messages that discuss the deletion of the LibGen dataset that was used to train their LLM. Plaintiffs argue that the messages may suggest that the company engaged in willful copyright infringement. If that’s the case, class members could be entitled to damages of up to $150,000 per work–the maximum allowed by the Copyright Act. “The stakes reach beyond a hefty damages award,” Bloomberg Law reports. “If the court finds that OpenAI destroyed evidence anticipating […]
Legal
Third-Party Law Firm Encourages Authors to Opt-Out of Anthropic Settlement
Plaintiffs in the Anthropic lawsuit have filed a motion for the court to stop a third-party law firm from soliciting authors to opt-out of the class settlement. ClaimsHero, an Arizona law firm with no connection to the case, purports to handle class action lawsuit claims on behalf of class members. They launched a page specifically for the Anthropic case, which plaintiffs argue does the opposite in a “bait-and-switch scheme”: anyone who signs up with ClaimsHero authorizes the company to opt them–and any copyright co-owner–out of the settlement and relinquish the right to any funds. “Class Members unfortunate enough to be […]
Legal: Wolff Suit Updates And Gaiman Suit Dismissal
The long-running Tracy Wolff plagiarism case is headed to one or more jury trials in the Southern District of New York some time in 2026. Writer Lynne Freeman is suing Crave series author Tracy Wolff; Emily Sylvan Kim at Prospect Agency; Entangled Publishing and their distributor Macmillan; and Universal City Studios, which optioned one of the books, alleging that the series bears “overwhelming and undeniable” similarities to Freeman’s unpublished manuscript Blue Moon Rising. Judge Colleen McMahon took over the case recently and issued a letter to counsel strongly suggesting that the case be tried as a bench trial, rather than a […]
PRH Sues to Recover Advance for Unpublished Donald Sutherland Memoir
Penguin Random House is suing to recoup the advance for late actor Donald Sutherland’s memoir, which was scheduled to be published in fall 2024. According to the complaint, Crown bought Sutherland’s memoir for $1.25 million in October 2023 and paid a $400,000 advance to the actor’s corporation, McNichol Inc. A coauthor delivered a draft in March 2024 and the editor provided feedback before Sutherland died in June. In July, McNichol told Crown that the manuscript was not approved by Sutherland’s estate. In August, the filing notes, “Crown provided a revised draft to facilitate completion.” The suit goes on to state […]
Academic Study Shows General Readers May Prefer AI Generated Text Over Expert Writing
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 […]
Consolidated Lawsuit Against OpenAI Will Go Forward
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 […]