While the capabilities of generative A.I. have been expanding exponentially, guardrails and regulations have not yet caught up with this growth. By the time it does, huge amounts of copyrighted and protected material may already have been ingested by new generations of  A.I. systems.  One way to curb this abuse is through litigation by artists and content creators whose rights have been infringed upon. A prominent national law firm, Baker Hostetler, has created a compendium of summaries of current litigation throughout the United States involving A.I. copyright infringement claims. As part of Local 802’s A.I. series, Baker Hostetler has very graciously permitted Allegro to republish this compendium below, as well as a link to updates to this case law summary. The holdings in these suits should help define the limitations imposed on generative A.I. These suits, however, are only as useful as the statutes upon which they are based.  Next month I hope to provide a compendium of current proposed legislation that will provide enhanced protections against unfair and exploitative use of generative A.I.   — Harvey S. Mars, Local 802 Recording Vice President and Local 802 officer liaison to the Local 802 A.I. Committee

Baker Hostetler tracks the leading AI copyright cases to explore how the law will treat both the creation and use of generative AI technology. The following information appeared at www.bakerlaw.com/aicasetracker as of Nov. 13, 2024. Please refresh the link for the latest information. The information below is reprinted with permission.

The rise of advanced generative AI has spawned a flurry of copyright litigations. In this case tracker, we monitor these cases in near real-time, providing case overviews, current statuses and key legal filings.

Generative AI raises challenging (and sometimes existential) questions about copyright protection, liability and enforcement. Content creators, generative AI developers and end users are monitoring how these issues play out in courts, and trying to adapt their own conduct to minimize risk without unnecessarily forgoing the benefits of this technology.

We track the developments in each of the following cases. Each case has a page devoted to an overview of the lawsuit, a repository of key filings, and a running summary of these filings.

Editor: Theresa M. Weisenberger. Additional Contributors: Diana C. Milton; Harrison A. Enright; and Jiwon (Jamie) Kim.

Cases and Their Developments

Alter v. OpenAI: What started as three separate cases brought by three different author groups has been consolidated into a single action against OpenAI and Microsoft. (This case includes Authors Guild and Basbanes). Plaintiffs alleged that OpenAI and Microsoft are liable for copyright infringement arising from the use of plaintiffs’ works to train defendants’ AI models. Nos. 1:23-cv-08292, 1:23-cv-10211, 1:24-cv-00084 (S.D.N.Y.)

Andersen v. Stability AI: Visual artists filed this putative class action, 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 eponymous generative AI tool, and DeviantArt’s DreamUp. The plaintiffs’ copyright infringement claims survived defendants’ motion to dismiss, while the court dismissed DMCA claims. No. (N.D. Cal.)

Center for Investigative Reporting v. OpenAI: The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization, filed a complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging defendants directly and indirectly infringed plaintiff’s copyright by using those works in their training sets. The issues in this case are similar to those in New York Times v. Microsoft and The Intercept Media and Raw Story Media v. OpenAI cases.

Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC: Several large music publishers sued Anthropic for direct and secondary copyright infringement and DMCA § 1202(b) violations, alleging that Anthropic improperly created and used unauthorized copies of copyrighted lyrics to train Claude and removed CMI from these copies. Plaintiffs also filed a motion for a preliminary injunction for defendants to preclude Anthropic from creating or using unauthorized copies of those lyrics to train future AI models. Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction and Anthropic’s motion to dismiss (or in the alternative, transfer) are currently pending. No. 5:24-cv-03811 (N.D. Cal).

Daily News v. Microsoft: Newspaper publishers sued Microsoft and OpenAI in the Southern District of New York for direct, vicarious and contributory copyright infringement, DMCA violations, common law unfair competition, trademark dilution, and dilution and injury to business reputation. Microsoft and OpenAI have filed motions to dismiss a subset of the claims. Openai has filed a motion to consolidate with New York Times. No. 1:24-cv-03285 (S.D.N.Y)

Doe v. GitHub, Inc.: Anonymous plaintiffs filed this putative class action, alleging that GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI used plaintiffs copyrighted materials to create Codex and Copilot. The current causes of action include breach of contract for open-source software licenses GitHub terms. This case is stayed pending interlocutry appeal of the court’s dismissal of plaintiffs’ DMCA claims.. No. 4:22-cv-06823 (N.D. Cal.)

Getty Images v. Stability AI: Getty Images filed this lawsuit accusing Stability AI of infringing more than 12 million photographs, their associated captions and metadata, in building and offering Stable Diffusion and DreamStudio. This case also includes trademark infringement allegations arising from the accused technology’s ability to replicate Getty Images’ watermarks in the AI outputs. Parties are currently engaged in jurisdictional discovery related to defendants’ motion to transfer. No. 1:23-cv-00135 (D. Del.)

Huckabee v. Bloomberg: Mike Huckabee (former governor of Arkansas) and others filed a putative class action complaint against Bloomberg alleging that Bloomberg is liable for direct copyright infringement for its use of the Books3 dataset to train its LLM. Defendant’s motion to dismiss has been fully briefed. (formerly Huckabee v. Meta) No. 1:23-cv-09152 (S.D.N.Y.)

The Intercept Media and Raw Story Media v. OpenAI: In two nearly identical lawsuits, a trio of news organizations represented by the same firm alleged DMCA violations arising out of the alleged inclusion of plaintiffs’ works of journalism in the datasets used to train ChatGPT. Defendants have moved to dismiss the complaint, arguing that plaintiffs fail to allege any public dissemination of CMI-less copies of plaintiffs’ work. Nos. 1:24-cv-01514, 1:24-cv-01515 (S.D.N.Y.)

Kadrey v. Meta: Some of the same plaintiffs from the OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation filed a similar complaint against Meta, alleging Meta’s unauthorized copying of the plaintiffs’ books for purposes of training LLaMA models constitutes copyright infringement. Meta filed its answer to the first amended complaint on January 10, 2024. No. 3:23-cv-03417 (N.D. Cal.)

Leovy v. Google: Plaintiffs filed this putative class action arising from the scraping and use of personal data and copyrighted content to train Google’s AI products (including Bard). Plaintiffs allege direct infringement claims based on Bard being trained on copyrighted works and outputting derivatives of those works. The court granted Google’s motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ first amended complaint. (formerly JL v. Alphabet) No. 3:23-cv-3440 (N.D. Cal.).

Nazemian and Dubus v. NVIDIA Corporation: Two groups of authors filed (now-related) class action complaints against NVIDIA Corporation, alleging that NVIDIA copied the authors’ copyrighted books without their permission to train its LLM, Nemo Megatron-GPT. Plaintiffs alleged that “[w]henever an LLM generates text output in response to a user prompt, it is performing a computation . . . with the goal of imitating the protected expression ingested from the training dataset.” Nos. 3:24-cv-01454, 3:24-cv-02655 (N.D. Cal.)

New York Times v. Microsoft: The New York Times alleged that millions of its copyrighted works were used to create the LLMs of Microsoft’s Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and that these AI tools generate verbatim NYT content, closely summarize it, mimic its expressive style, and falsely attribute outputs to NYT. The court is currently considering defendants’ motion to consolidate with Daily News v. Microsoft. No. 1:23-cv-11195 (S.D.N.Y.)

OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation: Three plaintiff groups, self-identified fiction and nonfiction authors, each filed a complaint in the Northern District of California against OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA violations and torts related to OpenAI’s GPT models and ChatGPT service. These cases  —  Tremblay v. OpenAI, Silverman v. OpenAI, and Chabon v. OpenAI  —  are now consolidated here. On March 13, plaintiffs filed amended complaint against all defendants.” to “The parties are currently briefing motions to dismiss plaintiffs’ amended complaint”

Thomson Reuters v. ROSS: Thomson Reuters sued ROSS Intelligence in May 2020, alleging the AI/legal research company unlawfully copied content from Thomson Reuter’s legal research platform Westlaw for the purpose of training its AI-based platform. The court permitted the parties to renew their respective summary judgment motions on direct infringement and fair use, scheduling a hearing on these motions for December 2024. No. 1:20-cv-00613 (D. Del.)

Additional Resources

IP Intelligence Blog – AI Content

The Definitive, One-Size-Fits-All AI Policy Guidelines

END OF GUEST COMMENTARY

Send feedback on Local 802’s A.I. series to Allegro@Local802afm.org.

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OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES:

BIG MUSIC AND A.I.

So how does A.I. actually work?

Protecting musicians from the existential threats of artificial intelligence

A DEEP DIVE INTO HOW A.I. AFFECTS MUSICIANS

“It all sounds the same”

“Artful” Intelligence

“How are you going to stop AI from stealing our jobs?”

Unleashing Creativity