Authors Unfair Competition Claim Dismissed in OpenAI Copyright Case

Authors attempting to sue OpenAI for using their works without permission have been dealt a partial blow after a judge dismissed their claim of unfair competition while allowing their copyright infringement claim to proceed.

The authors, including Sarah Silverman and Paul Tremblay, sought to claim OpenAI unfairly competed with them by using their literary works to train the underlying models powering ChatGPT.

California District Court Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín disagreed, dismissing the authors' Unfair Competition Law (UCL) claim as the rights asserted are essentially equivalent to those protected under copyright law.

The judge ruled that despite elements of the UCL being different from claims of copyright infringement, “the underlying nature of the Plaintiffs' UCL claim is 'part and parcel of [the] copyright claim.'"

“The UCL claim does not lack factual allegations; it lacks a tenable legal theory…,” Judge Martínez-Olguín wrote. “The court dismisses the UCL claim without leave to amend as amendment would be futile.” 

The authors filed a separate suit against OpenAI and Llama developer Meta in July 2023, alleging their content was used without permission to train language models. They allege that ChatGPT and Llama 2, when prompted, can generate snippets and summaries of their books and plays, which they argue violates copyright protections.

Related:New York Times Fights OpenAI's 'Unprecedented' Bid for Journalistic Materials

The plaintiffs had an earlier setback in their attempt to take on OpenAI after several counts of infringement were dismissed in February.

However, the main issue of the complaint — that ChatGPT directly infringed the authors’ copyrights — is still active following this latest ruling.

With the UCL claim dismissed, the focus of the dispute will now shift to the copyright infringement claim, where OpenAI will need to defend its alleged use of the authors' works in training ChatGPT.

A likely issue at the center of the dispute will be the question of fair use of AI training. Developers previously argued that using copyright materials for training AI models falls under the “transformative” requirement of fair use protections.

Rights holders take issue with this claim, and in the past 12 months, OpenAI has faced numerous lawsuits over how it allegedly compiled its training corpus.

Several newspapers, including the New York Times, have taken legal action against OpenAI.

In the latest from the Times case, OpenAI attempted to access journalists' notes and memos as part of discovery, an attempt the paper described as an “overbroad and unduly burdensome” demand.

Related:Newspapers Sue OpenAI, Microsoft Over Unauthorized Article Use