The authors assert that OpenAI is requesting better terms in New York after their planned litigation timetable was denied by a Californian judge.
In their case against the artificial intelligence (AI) startup OpenAI for copyright infringement, authors Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Sarah Silverman have asked a Californian court to reject concurrent New York claims brought by The New York Times (NYT), John Grisham, and others.
The writers contended in a court filing on Thursday, February 8, that allowing the copycat cases, which include the NYTs case and an earlier one started by the writers Guild on behalf of Grisham and others, would result in “inconsistent rulings in overlapping class actions” and be an abuse of legal process.
In July 2023, two writers, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, along with comedian and author Sarah Silverman, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI’s ChatGPT for copyright infringement. The lawsuit claimed that ChatGPT uses copyrighted content to demonstrate training when it provides summaries of the author’s work.
Additionally, the California plaintiffs asserted that OpenAI was able to engage in “forum shopping” and “procedural gamesmanship” thanks to the New York litigation.
The Californian authors told the court that the cases in New York were a lot like their own, implying that OpenAI is looking for better terms in New York after the California court denied its suggested litigation schedule.
Writers, graphic artists, and music publishers are among the copyright owners who have filed lawsuits against tech companies, like as Microsoft-backed OpenAI, alleging that their works have been misused for training generative A systems.
According to OpenAI, Meta, and other proponents, their AI training falls under the fair use copyright doctrine and is deemed transformative. As Meta noted, it is similar to past legal decisions, such Google’s book copying for search, which was decided to be fair use in the 2015 Authors Guild v. Google case.
Due to OpenAI’s alleged misuse of copyrighted material in the training of its AI models, a group of published writers based in New York led by the Authors Guild, which includes George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, George Saunders, and Jonathan Franzen, joined a proposed class-action lawsuit against the company in September 2023. This was followed by more NYT complaints. In order to defend the NYT’s original journalism, the lawsuit cited both the Copyright Act and the United States Constitution.