U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon delivered the ruling on Thursday. The plaintiffs, Raw Story Media Inc. and AlterNet Media Inc., retain the option to refile the lawsuit in the future with specific modifications.
The two media outlets submitted their complaint to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in February, alleging that OpenAI had utilized thousands of their articles in three artificial intelligence datasets. The lawsuit contended that these datasets were employed to train some of the large language models that support ChatGPT.
The complaint did not claim copyright infringement by OpenAI. Instead, it focused on the removal of copyright management information (CMI) from the articles prior to their inclusion in the training datasets.
CMI refers to legal details such as the author and title of an article. The plaintiffs argued that OpenAI's removal of this information violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, asserting that this action made OpenAI liable for damages.
Additionally, the lawsuit sought injunctive relief, which is a court order aimed at preventing a specific practice—in this case, the use of articles for AI training without the corresponding CMI. The plaintiffs expressed concern that ChatGPT might display copyrighted material from Raw Story and AlterNet without essential CMI details like article titles.
In response, OpenAI requested the court to dismiss the case, arguing that such lawsuits can only advance if the plaintiffs can prove they experienced "concrete harm." Raw Story and AlterNet contended that OpenAI's "unlawful removal of CMI from a copyrighted work" constitutes such harm.
The court ruled in favor of OpenAI. In the decision, McMahon emphasized, “It is important to clarify the core issue at hand. The true grievance the Plaintiffs seek to address is not the omission of CMI from the Defendants’ training datasets, but rather the Defendants’ utilization of the Plaintiffs’ articles to create ChatGPT without providing compensation to the Plaintiffs.”
The ruling permits Raw Story and AlterNet to refile their lawsuit under specific conditions. Notably, the publications are required to offer “an explanation of why the proposed amendment would not be futile.”
In a statement, OpenAI asserted, “We develop our AI models using data that is publicly accessible, in a manner that adheres to fair use and related legal principles, and is backed by established legal precedents.”
OpenAI continues to confront copyright lawsuits from over six other publications. In December, The New York Times initiated legal action against the ChatGPT developer and Microsoft Corp. for allegedly utilizing millions of its articles without authorization. Additionally, a coalition of eight news organizations lodged a similar complaint against the two companies in April.