3 Law Firms Are Picked as Co-Lead Counsel in Authors’ Suit vs. Microsoft, OpenAI

U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein for Southern New York in Manhattan signed an order Tuesday (dockets 1:23-cv-08292 and 1:23-cv-10211) appointing Lieff Cabraser, Susman Godfrey and Cowan DeBaets as the plaintiffs' interim co-lead counsel in the newly consolidated copyright infringement class action brought by 29 authors and the Authors Guild against Microsoft and OpenAI (see 2402050037). The authors allege that OpenAI and Microsoft copied their works and then fed them into their large language models, algorithms designed “to output human-seeming text responses to users’ prompts and queries.” Those algorithms are at the heart of the defendants’ “massive commercial enterprise,” and at the heart of these algorithms “is systematic theft on a mass scale,” alleges the complaint.