Antitrust

The Lawsuit, Filed in Federal District Court in New York, Alleges Flagrant and Extensive Theft of Creative Works of Fiction by OpenAI

In September 2023, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel filed a class action copyright infringement lawsuit in federal district court in New York on behalf of prominent authors including David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor LaValle, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow, and Rachel Vail, as well as The Authors Guild itself, against OpenAI seeking redress under the Copyright Act for OpenAI’s flagrant and harmful infringements of Plaintiffs’ registered copyrights in written works of fiction.

The class action lawsuit alleges that OpenAI copied the plaintiffs’ works wholesale, without permission or consideration, then fed the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works into their ‘large language models’ or ‘LLMs,’ systems designed to output human-seeming text responses to users’ prompts and queries. The suit includes claims for direct copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. section 501, as well as vicarious and contributory copyright infringement, and injunctive relief in the form of a fair licensing regime as well as statutory and other damages.

You can read a copy of the filed Complaint in the lawsuit.