1. Disney & Universal v. Midjourney
Background: A couple weeks ago, Disney and Universal filed suit for copyright infringement against Midjourney, an AI image generation platform. This new filing is unique because, although the AI litigation battlefield has seen major plaintiffs in news media entities such as The New York Times, so far no major visual media corporations have entered the fray. Disney and Universal are alleging straightforward claims of direct and secondary copyright infringement based on Midjourney’s unlicensed use of copyrighted works for training its models, which lead to an ability to generate the unlicensed likeness of the Plaintiffs’ characters.
The copyright infringement in Disney and Universal’s complaint also stands out from that alleged by author and news plaintiffs in other cases because it relies on what could be considered “normal use” of the Midjourney product. The complaint is filled with examples of images depicting Marvel, Star Wars, and DreamWorks characters. These images were not generated in response to prompts crafted by attorneys preparing the complaint — they were generated by normal Midjourney users who wanted to see what Shrek would look like as a 1950s greaser, as an example.
The complaint incorporates all of the grievances we have already seen from other plaintiffs, such as the use of copyrighted material for training and the generation of works that seem to mirror copyrighted training data. However, Disney and Universal are uniquely positioned to argue that Midjourney is engaged in and profiting from the massive distribution of works that infringe their copyrights. The facts, combined with Disney’s behemoth status in the media industry, will likely lead to unique dynamics not seen in the other cases.
Current Status: Disney and Universal are already making waves. There is some evidence that the lawsuit has already had an effect on Midjourney’s newest offering, it’s V1 video model. Professor Edward Lee is reporting that while Midjourney’s static image generator still reproduces Disney and Universal characters on command, the video model appears to have some new guardrails that reduce the output of copyrighted characters. We’ll see how this continues to develop.
2. Kadrey et al. v. Meta
Background: Author Richard Kadrey, comedian Silverman, and others sued Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta on July 7, 2023 in the U.S. District Court (Northern District of California) for mass infringement - i.e., unlicensed “training” of their generative AI model on millions of copyrighted works, including their own. Meta’s defense is “fair use.” The judge assigned is Judge Vince Chhabria.
At first, in November 2023, the Court dismissed the bulk of plaintiffs’ claims against Meta. But the Court gave plaintiffs a chance to amend their complaint to add a more direct link to actual harm - and they filed their amended complaint in December 2023.
Current Status: The Court is keeping us in suspense about “fair use.” The last five weeks saw no new docket entries from the parties. Before that, the parties completed their summary judgment briefing and argued their motions before Judge Chhabria at the scheduled summary judgement hearing. The parties now await the outcome of their motions on the issue of “fair use.” This ruling could have a profound impact on all the cases reported here, so check back each week and we will let you know when it issues!
3. Reddit v. Anthropic
Background: Reddit, which has an ongoing generative AI licensing program, recently filed state court claims against Anthropic. Reddit filed its new state court action in California alleging breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference, and unfair competition. Reddit is an online forum and link-sharing site with millions of daily users and which recently held its initial public offering. Reddit offers materials posted by its users as training data available for licensing to companies like Anthropic, and its central complaint is that Anthropic has circumvented its licensing process in order to scrape training data without compensating Reddit, in violation of its User Agreement.
According to Reddit, although Anthropic has publicly stated that it does not scrape Reddit for training data, Reddit’s audit logs show that Anthropic has continued to deploy “automated bots to access Reddit content more than one hundred thousand times” in the months following these statements. Reddit alleges that this access outside its permitted licensing channels posses a risk to its users’ privacy as well as to the performance of the site itself, which must process these incoming automated requests in order to serve responses to them.
This case is distinct from other cases reported here because — unlike many other Plaintiffs — Reddit has an established channel through which Anthropic could pay for and benefit from Reddit’s data. Reddit’s position, therefore, is not one of an unwilling participant in the development process of AI, but rather that of a company which very much wishes to be a go-to source for training data and which is attempting to ensure that this benefit is only provided to paying partners in this enterprise. We will continue to report as this case develops.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. We will continue to report as this case develops.
4. Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence
Background: On February 11th, 2025, in a case that comes tantalizingly close to deciding the issue of “fair use” in generative AI model training (with many taking the position that now that issue is firmly decided, as laid out below), Circuit Judge Bibas of the District of Delaware ruled that the “fair use” doctrine does not protect the use of West Headnotes in determining what to display as a result of a user query. Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence involves an AI search tool made by the now-defunct Ross Intelligence (“Ross”). Ross’ tool accepted user queries on legal questions and responded with relevant case law. To determine what cases to provide in response to user queries, Ross compared the user queries to “Bulk Memos” from LegalEase, which were written using Westlaw Headnotes. Boiling it down, when a user’s query contained language similar to a West Headnote, Ross’ tool would respond by providing the cases that the West Headnote related to.
While Ross’s tool was not a modern generative AI model (it didn’t use a transformer model or perform next-token prediction to generate unique output for queries), an important similarity exists between Ross’ use of West Headnotes and the way generative AI models train on other copyrighted materials. Ross’ tool did not actually reproduce the West Headnotes in response to a user’s query. Ross used the Headnotes just for “training,” that is, to determine what to produce in response to a user's query. It is easy to draw an analogy between Ross’ use of West Headnotes to determine what cases are responsive to a user’s query, and OpenAI’s use of The New York Times articles to determine how to respond to a question about politics (see the separate The New York Times case against OpenAI summary below). The technology is different, but the themes are similar.
In that context, the Court’s grant of summary judgment against Ross’ fair-use defense — as a matter of law — provides insight into how another court might rule in a generative AI training case. “Fair use” is based on four factors: (1) the purpose and character of the use, (2) the nature of the copyrighted work, (3) the amount of the work used, and (4) the potential impact on the market. The Thompson Reuters Court found that factors two and three favored Ross because of the low degree of creativity involved in carving out headnotes from cases, as well as the fact that Ross did not output the headnotes themselves but rather judicial opinions. However, factor one favored Thomson Reuters because of the commercial nature of Ross’ product and the fact that it was not transformative. The Court noted that Ross’ product was not generative AI, suggesting that a generative AI product could be more transformative than the simpler lexical searching tool that Ross made. Finally, the fourth factor and “undoubtedly the single most important element of fair use” favored Thomson Reuters because of the potential impact on Thomson Reuters’ ability to sell its own data for use in training AI if Ross’ use was permissible. On balance, the Court flatly rejected Ross’ “fair use” defense as a matter of law. That question will not go to a jury.
AI developers will undoubtedly focus on the issue of transformative-use in generative AI fair-use battles to come, but the “commercial use” and “market impact” factors will continue to favor content owners over generative AI companies. We have already seen several massive licensing deals where companies like Reuters and Reddit are profiting from the sale of their own data. If courts continue to favor the “market impact” factor as we see in Thompson Reuters, then OpenAI, Suno, and the like will have an uphill battle to prove their “fair use” defense.
Current Status: We are still awaiting the “fair use” determination by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, after the federal district court had certified Ross’ fair-use and copyrightability arguments for interlocutory appeal. On April 4th, the federal district court judge granted Ross Intelligence’ motion for interlocutory appeal off the Court’s summary judgment ruling against Ross’ “fair use” and copyrightability arguments. The Court stated that “Though I remain confident in my February 2025 summary judgment opinion, I recognize that there are substantial ground for difference of opinion on controlling legal issues in this case.” The two questions certified are “(1) whether the West headnotes and West Key Number System are original; and (2) whether Ross’s use of the headnotes was fair use.”
We’re not particularly surprised at this development. The country is watching this case rather closely because of its proximity to the GenAI training cases, and the hundreds of billions of dollars at stake there. Trying the case without considering the certified questions, and then having those issues reversed on appeal could waste everyone’s resources.
5. SDNY Multi-District Litigation (New Format for the Consolidated Cases)
Background: Federal Judge Stein (Southern District of New York) is the multi-district litigation (MDL) judge for twelve high-profile generative AI cases. On April 3rd, the MDL panel consolidated the following cases for pretrial proceedings:
1. TREMBLAY, ET AL. v. OPENAI, INC., ET AL., C.A. No. 3:23−03223
2. SILVERMAN, ET AL. v. OPENAI, INC., ET AL., C.A. No. 3:23−03416
3. CHABON, ET AL. v. OPENAI, INC., ET AL., C.A. No. 3:23−04625
4. MILLETTE v. OPENAI, INC., ET AL., C.A. No. 5:24−04710Southern District of New York
5. AUTHORS GUILD, ET AL. v. OPENAI, INC., ET AL., C.A. No. 1:23−08292
6. ALTER, ET AL. v. OPENAI, INC., ET AL., C.A. No. 1:23−10211
7. THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY v. MICROSOFT CORPORATION, ET AL.,C.A. No. 1:23−11195
8. BASBANES, ET AL. v. MICROSOFT CORPORATION, ET AL., C.A. No. 1:24−00084
9. RAW STORY MEDIA, INC., ET AL. v. OPENAI, INC., ET AL., C.A No. 1:24−01514*
10. THE INTERCEPT MEDIA, INC. v. OPENAI, INC., ET AL., C.A. No. 1:24−01515
11. DAILY NEWS LP, ET AL. v. MICROSOFT CORPORATION, ET AL.,C.A. No. 1:24−03285
12. THE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING, INC. v. OPENAI, INC., ET AL.,C.A. No. 1:24−04872
Current Status: The log preservation dispute continues to steal the spotlight. Going forward, we will be presenting the consolidated multi-district litigation cases together. As we reported last week, the News Plaintiffs and OpenAI continue to fight over whether OpenAI’s conversation logs should be preserved and sampled to search for evidence of direct copyright infringement. This week, Judge Stein ordered that the parties should meet and confer regarding OpenAI’s proposed methodology for comparing the logs which are ordinarily retained with a set of log data marked for deletion by June 23rd. The Court also asked that the parties submit a joint proposal regarding the methodology by the following day, and set a hearing for the preservation dispute to be held after technology tutorials are given on June 26th.
Although a number of other events took place last week — including OpenAI’s efforts to stay proceedings by Ziff Davis as to any causes of action or models that were not already being litigated by prior MDL parties and the entry of a new class of plaintiff-authors into the case, it seems the Court’s docket has been largely focused with this ongoing discovery dispute between the News Plaintiffs and OpenAI. Check back next week to see how it is resolved.
6. The New York Times v. Microsoft & OpenAI
Background: On December 27, 2023, The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement and other related claims. The Times alleges that the companies used “millions” of its copyrighted articles to train their AI models without its consent. The Times claims this has resulted in economic harm by pulling users away from their paywalled content and impacting advertising revenue. The complaint alleges several causes of action, including copyright infringement, unfair competition, and trademark dilution. In its pleadings, The Times asserts that Microsoft and OpenAI are building a “market substitute” for its news and further that their AI generates “hallucinations” based on The Times’ articles also substantially damage its reputation and brand. The Times seeks “billions of dollars of statutory and actual damages.” Microsoft and OpenAI assert the defense of “fair use” - i.e., no license, payment or consent is needed.
On September 13, 2024, the Court granted a motion to consolidate the case with another brought by the Daily News and other publications (see the MDL discussion above in Summary 1). The judge assigned to the consolidated cases is Judge Sidney Stein.
Current Status: OpenAI objects to preservation order. As we discussed previously, the Court has maintained its order for OpenAI to preserve chat logs that would otherwise be deleted under its privacy policies, citing concerns that the same users who might use ChatGPT to circumvent The New York Times’ paywall protections would be more likely to request deletion of their chat logs. OpenAI has maintained its objections to this order.
In its Objection to Preservation Order, OpenAI raised three main arguments. First, that the preservation order does not serve a useful purpose because the idea that certain users attempt to “cover their tracks” is far-fetched. Second, they argued that the Order is not proportional to the needs of the case, because it would require OpenAI to make infrastructural changes to support the retention and would strain user trust in OpenAI. Finally, OpenAI argued that the preservation order was based on false premises, stating that OpenAI did not “destroy” any data, and certainly did not delete any data in response to litigation events.
OpenAI’s false-premises argument cites support from a non-public declaration, but it appears that OpenAI may be relying on a narrow distinction between “deleting” data (which it is arguing is needed to maintain customer trust) and “destroying” data which the News Plaintiffs could argue gives rise to adverse inference.
7. UMG Recordings v. Uncharted Labs (d/b/a Udio)
Background: This case was brought on June 24, 2024, in the Southern District of New York, by a group of major record companies against the company behind Udio, a generative AI service launched in April 2024 by a team of former researchers from Google Deepmind. Much like Suno (above), Udio allows users to create digital music files based on text prompts or audio files. And as with the complaint against Suno, Plaintiffs rely on tests comprising targeted prompts including the characteristics of popular sound recordings — such as the decade of release, the topic, genre, and descriptions of the artist. They allege that using these prompts caused Udio's product to generate music files that strongly resembled copyrighted recordings. The claims are for direct infringement and related causes of action. The judge assigned is Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. The docket saw little movement this past week following the Court’s clarification that digital copies of deposit copies would suffice from UMG earlier. Uncharted had previously argued that UMG had to provide original copies of the documents deposited at the Copyright Office. UMG (and in our opinion, a healthy dose of common sense) defeated that argument. However, the Court extended time for document production in the case to July 25th and will be holding a status conference on July 30th. But it is widely reported that UMG and the other major labels are exploring a potential licensing deal with Udio, pursuant to which the record companies would also get equity stakes in Udio.
8. UMG Recordings v. Suno
Background: The RIAA on behalf of the major record labels filed their lawsuit in the federal district Court in Massachusetts on June 24th, 2024, for mass copyright infringement and related claims based on alleged training on their copyrighted works. Suno is a generative AI service that allows users to create digital music files based on text prompts. This is the first case brought against an AI service related to sound recordings. In its answer on August 1st, 2024, Suno argued that its actions were protected by fair use. The judge assigned is Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor, IV.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. As we discussed several weeks ago, the Court adopted the parties’ joint stipulation and proposed order stipulating that digital copies of the works would suffice as deposit copies. The Court held a status conference on June 5th, at which the parties noted that they anticipated a joint motion to extend deadlines. BUT it is widely reported that UMG and the other major labels are exploring a potential licensing deal with Suno as well, pursuant to which the record companies would also get equity stakes in Suno.
9. Concord Music Group, et al. v. Anthropic
Background: UMG, Concord Music and several other major music companies sued Amazon-backed OpenAI competitor Anthropic on October 18th, 2023 in the U.S. District Court (Middle District of Tennessee). The music companies assert that Anthropic is infringing their music lyric copyrights on a massive scale by scraping the entire web to train its AI, essentially sucking up their copyrighted lyrics into its vortex – all without any licensing, consent or payment. In its response, Anthropic claimed fair use. The case was transferred to the Northern District of California on June 26th, 2024 and closed in Tennessee. The judge assigned is Judge Eumi K. Lee. The parties have not yet had a case management conference.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. The past three weeks have been quiet, with few docket developments. This week saw only two new filings, with the parties agreeing to extend the initial deadline for alternative dispute resolution to August 25th. This could mean any number of things, from the parties not being able to agree on a mediator to attorney travel conflicts or maybe (just maybe) some real negotiations happening behind the scenes. We’ll report on whatever we find!
10. Sarah Andersen v. Stability AI
Background: Visual artists filed this putative class action on January 13th, 2023, 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 generative AI tool, and DeviantArt’s DreamUp. On August 12th, 2024, the Court dismissed many of the claims in Plaintiffs’ first amended complaint, leaving the claims for direct copyright infringement, trademark, trade dress, and inducement. The assigned judge is Judge William H. Orrick.
Current Status: The dispute over Dr. Zhao continues. As discussed previously, the parties have had an ongoing dispute over whether Plaintiffs’ expert, Dr. Ben Yanbin Zhao, should be permitted to examine Defendants’ source code. Dr. Zhao, is both a computer science professor and the creator of tools which are intended to help artists protect their work against being used as AI training data without their permission. These tools, Glaze and Nightshade (which plaintiffs derisively call the “poison” tools), alter images and their associated data to cause them to be poor training data for models. As a result, Defendants have argued that Dr. Zhao should not be given access to their confidential materials.
Last week, we reported that the Court had ordered the parties to consider another expert — Dr. Emily Wenger of Duke University. Dr. Wenger was one of Dr. Zhao’s graduate students and also worked on the Glaze and Nightshade tools. The Court ordered the parties to submit a joint status report on the suitability of Dr. Wenger for use as an expert to replace Dr. Zhao on June 16th.
This past week, the parties submitted their joint status report as instructed, and it appears that little has changed. Plaintiffs note that Dr. Wenger raises many of the same concerns as Dr. Zhao and that she is unavailable to serve as their expert. Additionally, Defendants have noted that they would condition their acceptance of Dr. Wenger on her suspension of research work for three years (a proposal which they also made for Dr. Zhao), which Plaintiffs understandably point out as being untenable for a career academic. Defendants maintain that Dr. Wenger is a suitable alternative to Dr. Zhao, though they maintain that they are “not trying to force Plaintiffs to use Dr. Wenger” and only intended to rebut the idea that Dr. Zhao was irreplaceable.
It would seem that the parties are no closer to resolving this dispute, so check back soon to find out if the Court can untangle this mess.
11. Ziff Davis v. OpenAI
Background: Ziff Davis, the parent company to a variety of health and technology media corporations (including Everyday Health, Mashable, and PCMag), recently sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, DMCA violations, unjust enrichment, and trademark dilution. Ziff’s allegations are based on the use of its articles as training data for OpenAI’s LLMs, and additionally include factual allegations that Ziff attempted to follow OpenAI’s instructions to modify its robots.txt file (an informational file served by websites to instruct search engines and other web crawlers in what they can and cannot scrape from the website), but only saw an increase in OpenAI scraping activity when it did.
In addition to copyright infringement allegations, Ziff argues that this improper scraping resulted in the reproduction of its content with copyright information removed — and also enriched OpenAI despite a lack of authorization by or compensation to Ziff. Further, Ziff alleges that OpenAI has exploited the registered trademarks of Ziff’s websites in order to promote itself by providing incomplete, misleading, or even false summaries of content published by Ziff’s subsidiaries.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this week. This case continues to develop alongside the other consolidated MDL cases mentioned above, with no new docket entries unique to Ziff Davis’ issues. Check back soon as the parties continue to develop discovery protocols, as it is likely that unique issues will develop as the litigants establish their positions and gain access to discovery materials.
12. In re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation
Background: Comedian Sarah Silverman and other artists filed this class action lawsuit in the Northern District of California on June 28th, 2023, asserting copyright infringement claims, in addition to unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment. Plaintiffs alleged that OpenAI used their copyrighted written works to train its AI chatbot. In February, the Court dismissed most of the claims against OpenAI, rejecting Plaintiffs’ argument that the content generated by ChatGPT (i.e., the “output”) infringes their copyrighted works because there is no “substantial similarity” on the “output” side of the copyright question (and, therefore, no meaningful harm). But the Court gave Plaintiffs an opportunity to amend their complaint to plead a more direct link of harm (which they later did). In July, the Court dismissed the unfair competition claim. The claim for direct infringement is the only main one that remains. The case is assigned to Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. These cases were among those transferred to the Southern District of New York in the Multidistrict Litigation transfer order. This week saw no notable developments, though the litigation was reopened in SDNY following the transfer.
13. Raw Story Media & Alternet v. OpenAI
Background: News publishers Raw Story Media and Alternet filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft on February 28th, 2024 in the Southern District of New York, claiming their articles were used to train the LLM that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Rather than claiming copyright infringement, Plaintiffs alleged one cause of action for violating the DMCA (which is a separate provision of the Copyright Act related to Internet content). Plaintiffs claimed that OpenAI removed the CMI from their articles, which they argue is a violation of the DMCA.
Current Status: The battle over reconsideration continues. Plaintiffs recently submitted their arguments in favor of the Court reconsidering the dismissal of their claims prior to MDL consolidation. Plaintiffs’ argument narrowly focuses on inconsistencies between the dismissal of their claims and the non-dismissal of similar claims by other litigants in the MDL. They argue that reconsideration is necessary in order to resolve these inconsistencies and therefore is supported by the overall objective of multi-district litigation, which is to ensure consistent handling of closely-related issues. We will continue to report on this dispute, which is likely Plaintiffs’ last chance to stay in the litigation.
14. Dow Jones & Co, et al v. Perplexity AI
Background: On October 21st, 2024 The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post sued generative search company Perplexity AI in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement and other related claims. A new twist in this litigation is the focus on Retrieval Augmented Generation (“RAG”) AI. RAG GenAI not only uses an LLM trained on copyrighted material to respond to individual prompts, but also goes out to the web to update itself based on the relevant query. Perplexity even said the quiet part out loud, encouraging its users to “skip the links” to the actual sources of the copyrighted content. Based on Perplexity’s RAG model, the media Plaintiffs allege that Perplexity is infringing on their copyrights at the input and output stage, sometimes reproducing copyrighted content verbatim. Plaintiffs cited their parent company News Corp’s recent licensing agreement with OpenAI in explaining that GenAI technology can be developed by legitimate means.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. Several months ago we reported that Plaintiffs submitted their memorandum of law opposing Defendant’s motion to dismiss or transfer the case. Three weeks ago, Perplexity submitted its reply arguing that the Court lacked personal jurisdiction due to insufficient contacts with New York. No new developments occurred this week but check back to find out how Defendant’s motion resolves.
15. Brave Software, Inc. v. News Corp., et al.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. No new developments have taken place yet in this newly filed case but check back here to find out when they do.
As reported last week: Brave Software filed an action for declaratory judgment of no copyright infringement, copyright misuse, and no breach of contract against News Corp, Dow Jones, and NYP Holdings. Brave distributes the open-source Brave browser, which blocks ads and trackers while displaying its own limited set of ads as a source of revenue for the company. Brave Software also developed Brave Search, which exited beta in mid-2022 and which serves as the default search engine in the Brave browser. Brave Search is also significant because it is the search engine which certain AI chatbots such as Perplexity, Mistral, and others make use of. Brave filed its declaratory judgment action following the receipt of cease-and-desist letters from the named Defendants.
The allegations are that Brave, by indexing Defendants’ websites in order to enervate its Brave Search engine, infringed on Defendants’ copyrights and breached their terms of service. In its complaint, Brave characterized these allegations as baseless bullying intended to prevent new entrants to the sectors already dominated by Big Tech. Brave maintains that its indexing is well-established fair use and non-infringing. Although it does not directly implicate LLMs, this case’s relation to AI cannot be denied. Not only is Brave Search used by several AI chatbots, the allegations at issue also track the logic of copyright infringement theories alleged by artists and authors against AI companies. As always, we will keep you updated here each week as the case develops.
16. Getty Images v. Midjourney and Stability AI
Background: Getty Images filed this lawsuit against image generator Stability AI on February 2nd, 2023, accusing the company of infringing more than 12 million photographs, their associated captions and metadata, in building and offering Stable Diffusion and DreamStudio. Getty’s claims are similar to those in The New York Times v. Microsoft & OpenAI case above, but here they are in the context of visual images instead of written articles - i.e., unlicensed scraping by their AI with an intent to compete directly with, and profit from, Getty Images (i.e., market substitution). This case also includes trademark infringement allegations arising from the accused technology’s ability to replicate Getty Images’ watermarks in the AI outputs. Getty filed its Second Amended Complaint on July 8th, 2024, and the parties are currently engaged in jurisdictional discovery related to Defendants’ motion to transfer the case to the Northern District of California. The judge assigned is Judge Jennifer L. Hall.
Current Status: Still no update for Getty. With no notable updates for Getty in over a third of a year, we will be placing this case on the back-burner.
As a final update on where we last left off: Getty had submitted a letter to the Court on November 25th explaining its frustration with Stability AI’s refusal to participate in discovery or participate in a Rule 26(f) conference. In August, Stability AI argued that they were under no obligation to commence fact discovery until the Court issued its ruling on jurisdiction. Getty had requested that the Court order Stability to stop delaying and proceed with the case, but after several months with no response from the Court, it appears unclear when things will begin moving forward again.
We will continue to keep tabs on this case and provide an update if and when it resumes forward movement.
17. The Intercept Media v. OpenAI
Background: The Intercept Media, a news publisher represented by the same firm that represents the plaintiffs in the Raw Story Media litigation below, filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft on February 28th, 2024 in the Southern District of New York, the same day Raw Story Media commenced their suit. Like the Raw Story allegations, The Intercept alleged that their articles were used to train ChatGPT and brought claims for the removal of the copyright management information (“CMI”) from the articles.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. Nothing new since OpenAI filed its answer to The Intercept’s First Amended Complaint on December 6th, 2024. OpenAI presented 10 affirmative defenses, including fair use, several equitable doctrines, statute of limitations, lack of mitigation, and failure to state a claim.
18. The Center for Investigative Reporting v. OpenAI
Background: The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal, sued Microsoft and OpenAI for essentially the same claims made in The New York Times case above.
Current Status: Motion to consolidate recently granted! Microsoft and OpenAI asked the Court to consolidate this case with NY Times v. Microsoft & OpenAI, and — and, as indicated above, the Magistrate granted the motion to consolidate on October 30th, 2024 (refer to the activity discussed above).
19. The Authors Guild, et al. v. OpenAI
Case Background. The Authors Guild and seventeen individual authors (including John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Nicholas A. Basbanes) filed a putative class-action suit against OpenAI on September 19th, 2023. Plaintiffs claimed that OpenAI trained its ChatGPT LLM by copying their copyrighted works. The complaint brings claims under 17 U.S.C. §501 for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement. The case is assigned to Judge Ona T. Wang.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this week. We are still waiting for the Court’s decision on discovery consolidation. The case seems to be on ice until then.
20. INTERNATIONAL CASE TRACKED: Canadian News Media Companies v. OpenAI
In a case similar to The New York Times v. OpenAI, Canada’s major news organizations sued OpenAI for copyright infringement on November 28th. Filed in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, the news organizations are seeking billions of dollars in compensation for the “ongoing, deliberate, and unauthorized misappropriation of the Plaintiffs’ valuable news media works.” This is the first case of its kind in Canada, and presents a new front against OpenAI, after one was opened in Germany in Gema v. OpenAI as reported last week.
See https://litigate.com/assets/uploads/Canadian-News-Media-Companies-v-OpenAI.pdf
21. INTERNATIONAL CASE TRACKED: GEMA v. OpenAI
GEMA, a German association representing more than 95,000 composers, lyricists and publishers, filed suit in German court accusing OpenAI of reproducing their members’ song lyrics without a license. Gema claims this is a test case to clarify the law in Germany, and that it aims to establish a license model that would compensate music creators whose works are used to train AI models. The details of German copyright law are a bit beyond the scope of this blog, but we did think it noteworthy that the litigation trend is catching on worldwide. While we don’t plan to track this case closely, we will watch for any momentous developments.