A federal judge ruled on Nov. 7 that two independent news sites have failed to prove that there is “substantial risk” and injury from OpenAI using content to train ChatGPT writing software.
New York District Judge Colleen McMahon granted OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the complaint brought in February by plaintiffs Raw Story and AlterNet, the two online news platforms sued for copyright infringement.
The plaintiffs alleged that they are entitled to statutory damages for the “thousands” of copyrighted works that were used in OpenAI’s training sets, some of which included ChatGPT. They allege that the defendant removed the copyrighted management information (CMI).
The plaintiffs alleged that if their works remained stored in ChatGPT’s database without CMI, it would continue to reproduce its work without citing sources.
Citing case law, McMahon said the plaintiffs based their argument on Article III of the U.S. Constitution which requires that the plaintiffs show “concrete injury even in the context of a statutory violation” that would “likely be redressed by judicial relief.”
OpenAI argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing on its claim that it was entitled to relief under Article III, to which McMahon agreed.
Among the judge’s arguments for her order was that the plaintiffs failed to present “any actual adverse effects stemming” from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996, which prohibits copyright infringement on the internet.
On its petition for injunctive relief requiring OpenAI to remove its content, McMahon said the plaintiffs’ argument falls short because ChatGPT hasn’t reproduced any of the plaintiff’s copyrighted work without the attached CMI.
There is only the “substantial risk” that it will do so in the future.
“However, Defendants argue that Plaintiffs lack standing to seek injunctive relief because they fail to allege facts tending to show that the risk of ChatGPT reproducing Plaintiffs’ work, in whole or in part, absent the requisite CMI is ‘substantial,’” McMahon said.
McMahon agreed with the defendants, stating that the plaintiffs “have nowhere alleged that the information in their articles is copyrighted, nor could they do so.”
“When a user inputs a question into ChatGPT, ChatGPT synthesizes the relevant information in its repository into an answer,” McMahon said. “Given the quantity of information contained in the repository, the likelihood that ChatGPT would output plagiarized content from one of Plaintiffs’ articles seems remote.”
McMahon said the argument underlying the plaintiff’s claim for redress isn’t the absence of CMI from the content but the use of articles to develop ChatGPT training language “without compensation.”
“Whether there is another statute or legal theory that does elevate this type of harm remains to be seen,” McMahon said.
Raw Story and AlterNet didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment on the judge’s ruling by publication time.
