A New York federal judge last Thursday dismissed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence giant OpenAI that claimed it misused articles from news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet to train its large language models.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon said that the outlets could not show enough harm to support the lawsuit but allowed them to file a new complaint, even though she said she was “skeptical” that they could “allege a cognizable injury.”
Raw Story’s owners acquired AlterNet in 2018. Raw Story attorney, Matt Topic of Loevy + Loevy said the outlets were “certain we can address the concerns the court identified through an amended complaint.”
“We build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal precedents,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement.
Raw Story and AlterNet filed the lawsuit in February. They said that thousands of their articles were used without permission to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT and that it reproduces their copyrighted material when prompted.
The case is part of a wave of lawsuits against OpenAI and other tech companies by authors, visual artists, music publishers and other copyright owners over the data used to train their generative AI systems. A lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI in December was the first from a media outlet.
Unlike similar lawsuits, Raw Story and AlterNet’s complaint accused OpenAI of unlawfully removing their articles’ copyright management information (CMI) without arguing that it infringed their copyrights. McMahon agreed with OpenAI that the claims should be dismissed.
“Let us be clear about what is really at stake here,” McMahon said. “The alleged injury for which Plaintiffs truly seek redress is not the exclusion of CMI” but the “use of Plaintiffs’ articles to develop ChatGPT without compensation.”
McMahon said that the harm cited by the outlets is “not the type of harm that has been elevated” to a level that would justify the lawsuit.
“Whether there is another statute or legal theory that does elevate this type of harm remains to be seen,” McMahon said. “But that question is not before the Court today.”
The cases are Raw Story Media v. OpenAI Inc, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:24-cv-01514.
