Recently, the American news website The Intercept filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for removing copyright information from news articles during the training process of ChatGPT. This move has drawn widespread attention to copyright issues in artificial intelligence model training and also highlighted the limitations of existing copyright laws in responding to new technological challenges. New York federal judge Jed S. Rakoff partially dismissed the lawsuit, but allowed the main DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint against OpenAI to continue to be heard. This paved the way for subsequent legal battles and provided a reference for other media organizations.
Recently, a federal judge in New York ruled to allow the American news website The Intercept to continue part of its lawsuit against OpenAI. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) when training its artificial intelligence model. The core issue involved is that OpenAI removed copyright management information from news articles when creating the training data for ChatGPT. , such as title and author name. The Intercept believes that this approach violates the protection of authorship.
The judge overseeing the case, Jed S. Rakoff, dismissed some of the claims, specifically all of the claims against Microsoft, but allowed the main DMCA complaint against OpenAI to proceed. In response, Matt Topic, a lawyer for The Intercept, said: "This decision demonstrates that the DMCA provides news organizations with important protections against the infringement of their content by artificial intelligence companies." He also said that this The first judgment is a "first-of-its-kind decision" and is believed to have wider implications.
Currently, courts face significant challenges in how to apply existing copyright laws to artificial intelligence systems trained on protected material. Previously, another New York federal judge dismissed a similar lawsuit, also against OpenAI, with the plaintiffs being the news website Raw Story and AlterNet. In this case, the judge pointed out that the problem was not the removal of copyrighted information, but that OpenAI used the plaintiff’s article without compensation.
In this case, Judge Rakoff held that The Intercept may prove that specific harm was caused by the removal of copyrighted information, so the issue will enter further legal review. The Intercept filed the lawsuit in February this year, and the wave of lawsuits has intensified as more and more media companies take legal action against OpenAI and Microsoft due to various copyright issues in AI development. The preliminary ruling could mark the beginning of a longer legal battle over the use of copyrighted content for AI model training.
Highlight:
The Intercept was allowed to continue its lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing it of violating the DMCA.
The judge dismissed the case against Microsoft but allowed the main complaint against OpenAI to be heard.
The court faces the challenge of how to apply existing copyright laws to AI systems, and the outcome of the case may affect broader copyright laws.
The verdict of this case will have a profound impact on the future development of the artificial intelligence industry and copyright laws. The subsequent trial process deserves continued attention. It is not only related to the fate of OpenAI, but also to the respect and compliance of copyright by the entire AI industry.