Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster have initiated legal proceedings against OpenAI, accusing the artificial intelligence leader of "massive copyright infringement" in their formal complaint.
The lawsuit states that Britannica, as the owner of Merriam-Webster, possesses copyrights for approximately 100,000 online articles. The publisher contends that OpenAI's large language models (LLMs) were trained using this copyrighted material, which was allegedly "scraped" without proper authorization.
Furthermore, Britannica's complaint details additional copyright violations, including instances where OpenAI's outputs reportedly contain "full or partial verbatim reproductions" of its copyrighted material. The suit also challenges OpenAI's use of Britannica's articles within ChatGPT's Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow, a process where the LLM accesses external databases for current information to answer queries. Beyond copyright, Britannica also claims OpenAI infringes upon the Lanham Act, a trademark law, by producing AI "hallucinations" – fabricated information – that are misleadingly attributed to the publisher.
The legal filing asserts that "ChatGPT starves web publishers like [Britannica] of revenue by generating responses to users’ queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers like [Britannica]." Moreover, Britannica argues that the prevalence of ChatGPT's "hallucinations" poses a significant threat to "the public’s continued access to high-quality and trustworthy online information."
Britannica's action places it among a growing number of prominent publishers and authors who have initiated legal proceedings against OpenAI concerning copyright infringement. Notable plaintiffs include The New York Times, Ziff Davis (the parent company of Mashable, CNET, IGN, and PC Mag), and more than a dozen newspapers spanning the United States and Canada, such as the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, the Sun-Sentinel, the Toronto Star, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
It is also worth noting that a similar lawsuit filed by Britannica against Perplexity remains ongoing.
The legal landscape regarding the use of copyrighted material to train LLMs lacks clear precedent on whether such activity constitutes infringement. However, in a significant related case, federal judge William Alsup was persuaded that the act of using content as training data for an LLM could be considered transformative and thus legal. Despite this, Judge Alsup concurrently ruled that Anthropic had violated the law by unlawfully downloading millions of books without compensation, resulting in a substantial $1.5 billion class action settlement for the affected authors.
OpenAI did not provide a comment in response to TechCrunch's inquiry prior to the publication of this report.
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