Plaintiffs in First-Filed OpenAI Copyright Suit Seek to Challenge 4 SDNY ‘Copycat’ Cases

The 14 plaintiffs in the first-filed copyright infringement suit against OpenAI in the Northern District of California seek to intervene and to dismiss the four actions against OpenAI and Microsoft filed subsequently in the Southern District of New York, said their motion Monday (docket 1:24-cv-00084). In the alternative, they seek to stay the four SDNY actions or transfer them to the NDCA, it said. The NDCA complaint was the first in the U.S. to allege that OpenAI committed direct copyright infringement when it made copies of the plaintiffs’ books without permission in order to train OpenAI’s language models, it said. The SDNY lawsuits are all “copycat cases,” said the motion. The subsequently filed SDNY actions are “strikingly similar” to the first-filed case, it said. Their claims “share common or overlapping theories of liability,” it said. OpenAI, in an apparent attempt to "undercut" the NDCA’s scheduling order, agreed to forego its motion to transfer the SDNY cases to NDCA, it said. By its “blatant forum shopping,” OpenAI is creating the likelihood, or certainty, of “inconsistent rulings in overlapping class actions and the attendant waste of judicial resources,” it said. “This is precisely the type of procedural gamesmanship the first-to-file rule was adopted to arrest,” it said. To avoid duplicative efforts, judicial waste and potentially disparate rulings, the SDNY should apply the first-to-file rule and dismiss, or in the alternative, stay or transfer the SDNY actions, it said.