OpenAI, Microsoft Operate as if Copyright Laws ‘Do Not Exist,’ Allege 29 Authors

OpenAI and Microsoft have built a business valued into the tens of billions of dollars “by taking the combined works of humanity without permission,” said 29 authors, plus the Authors Guild, in a class action Friday (docket 1:23-cv-08292) in U.S. District Court for Southern New York. The action combines the two previously separate complaints brought by fiction and nonfiction authors (see 2309210022). Rather than pay for intellectual property, such as when a person buys a book, “they choose to operate as if the laws protecting copyright do not exist,” the complaint said. The plaintiffs seek redress for the defendants’ “flagrant and harmful infringements” of their registered copyrights, it said. OpenAI and Microsoft copied their works and then fed them into their large language models (LLMs), algorithms designed “to output human-seeming text responses to users’ prompts and queries,” it said. Those algorithms are at the heart of the defendants’ “massive commercial enterprise,” it said. At the heart of these algorithms “is systematic theft on a mass scale,” it said. In training their LLMs, OpenAI and Microsoft “reproduced copyrighted texts to exploit precisely what the Copyright Act was designed to protect: the elements of protectible expression within them, like the choice and order of words and sentences, syntax, flow, themes, and paragraph and story structure,” it said. OpenAI and Microsoft “copied and data-mined” the works of writers, without permission or compensation, to build a machine that’s capable, or soon will be capable, “of performing the same type of work for which these writers would be paid,” it said. Without the “wide corpus” of copyrighted material on which to feed, there would be no ChatGPT, it said. The defendants’ commercial success “was possible only because they copied and digested the protected, copyrightable expression contained in billions of pages of actual text, across millions of copyrighted works -- all without paying a penny to the authors of those works,” it said.