March 24: AI Copyright Case Updates

Generative AI raises challenging (and sometimes existential) questions about copyright protection, liability and enforcement, which in turn has spawned a flurry of copyright litigations across four courts (N.D. Cal., S.D.N.Y., D. Del., and M.D. Tenn.)

Keeping up with all of these cases as they are consolidated, transferred, and renamed—not to mention how the various legal theories are developing—is a huge lift (believe me). We can help. Here’s where all these cases stand:

N.D. California Case Developments

OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation: Three plaintiff groups, self-identified fiction and nonfiction authors, each filed a complaint in the Northern District of California against OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA violations and torts related to OpenAI’s GPT models and ChatGPT service. These cases — Tremblay v. OpenAI, Silverman v. OpenAI, and Chabon v. OpenAI — are now consolidated here. On March 13, plaintiffs filed an amended complaint against all defendants. Nos. 3:23-cv-3223, 3:23-cv-03416, 3:23-cv-04625 (N.D. Cal.)

Andersen v. Stability AI: Visual artists filed this putative class action, alleging direct and induced copyright infringement, DMCA violations, false endorsement and trade dress claims based on the creation and functionality of Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and DreamStudio, Midjourney Inc.’s eponymous generative AI tool, and DeviantArt’s DreamUp. Each of the four defendant groups have pending motions to dismiss plaintiffs’ first amended complaint. No. 3:23-cv-00201 (N.D. Cal.)

Doe v. GitHub, Inc.: Anonymous plaintiffs filed this putative class action, alleging that GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI used plaintiffs copyrighted materials to create Codex and Copilot. The current causes of action include DMCA violations, breach of contract for the open-source software licenses governing use of the copyrighted materials, and breach of contract for violating GitHub terms. No. 4:22-cv-06823 (N.D. Cal.)

Kadrey v. Meta: Some of the same plaintiffs from the OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation filed a similar complaint against Meta, alleging Meta’s unauthorized copying of the plaintiffs’ books for purposes of training LLaMA models constitutes copyright infringement.?No. 3:23-cv-03417 (N.D. Cal.).

Leovy v. Google: Plaintiffs filed this putative class action arising from the scraping and use of personal data and copyrighted content to train Google’s AI products (including Bard). Plaintiffs allege direct infringement claims based on Bard being trained on copyrighted works and outputting derivatives of those works. Parties are briefing defendants’ motion to dismiss the complaint. (formerly JL v. Alphabet) No. 3:23-cv-3440 (N.D. Cal.)

Southern District of New York Case Developments

Alter v. OpenAI: What started as three separate cases brought by three different author groups has been consolidated into a single action against OpenAI and Microsoft. (This case includes Authors Guild and Basbanes). Plaintiffs alleged that OpenAI and Microsoft are liable for copyright infringement arising from the use of plaintiffs’ works to train defendants’ AI models. The Tremblay plaintiffs (from OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation) have filed a motion to intervene in this case as the first-filed class action case. Nos. 1:23-cv-08292, 1:23-cv-10211, 1:24-cv-00084 (S.D.N.Y.)

Huckabee v. Bloomberg: Mike Huckabee (former governor of Arkansas) and others filed a putative class action complaint against Bloomberg alleging that Bloomberg is liable for direct copyright infringement for its use of the Books3 dataset to train its LLM. (formerly Huckabee v. Meta) No. 1:23-cv-09152 (S.D.N.Y.)

The Intercept Media and Raw Story Media v. OpenAI: In two nearly identical lawsuits, The Intercept Media v. OpenAI and Raw Story Media v. OpenAI, a trio of news organizations represented by the same firm alleged DMCA violations arising out of the alleged inclusion of plaintiffs’ works of journalism in the datasets used to train ChatGPT. Nos. 1:24-cv-01514, 1:24-cv-01515 (S.D.N.Y.)

New York Times v. Microsoft: The New York Times alleges that millions of its copyrighted works were used to create the LLMs of Microsoft’s Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and that these AI tools generate verbatim NYT content, closely summarize it, mimic its expressive style, and falsely attribute outputs to NYT. Parties are briefing defendants’ motions to dismiss. No. 1:23-cv-11195 (S.D.N.Y.)

District of Delaware Case Developments

Getty Images v. Stability AI: Getty Images filed this lawsuit accusing Stability AI of infringing more than 12 million photographs, their associated captions and metadata, in building and offering Stable Diffusion and DreamStudio. This case also includes trademark infringement allegations arising from the accused technology’s ability to replicate Getty Images’ watermarks in the AI outputs. Parties are currently engaged in jurisdictional discovery related to defendants’ motion to transfer. No. 1:23-cv-0013 (D. Del.)

Thomson Reuters v. ROSS: Thomson Reuters sued ROSS Intelligence in May 2020, alleging the AI/legal research company unlawfully copied content from Thomson Reuter’s legal research platform Westlaw for the purpose of training its AI-based platform. On Sept. 25, the court denied both parties’ motions for summary judgment, leaving the issues of direct infringement and fair use for the jury to decide. Motions for summary judgment on defendant’s antitrust/anticompetition claims are pending. Trial is set for August 26, 2024. No. 1:20-cv-00613 (D. Del.)

Middle District of Tennessee Case Developments

Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC: Several large music publishers sued Anthropic for direct and secondary copyright infringement and DMCA § 1202(b) violations, alleging that Anthropic improperly created and used unauthorized copies of copyrighted lyrics to train Claude and removed CMI from these copies. Plaintiffs also filed a motion for a preliminary injunction for defendants to preclude Anthropic from creating or using unauthorized copies of those lyrics to train future AI models. The parties are concurrently briefing plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction and Anthropic’s motion to dismiss (or in the alternative, transfer). No. 3:23-cv-01092 (M.D. Tenn.)

At bakerlaw.com/aicasetracker, we track the developments in each of these cases. Each case has a page devoted to an overview of the lawsuit, a repository of key filings, and a running summary of these filings. Cases change quickly, so check back often!