A group of well-known authors, including Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Sarah Silverman, who are currently suing artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI for copyright infringement, have called on a California court to dismiss similar lawsuits filed by The New York Times (NYT), John Grisham, and others in New York.
In a court filing submitted on Thursday, Feb. 8, the authors argued that allowing these copycat lawsuits, which include the NYT’s case and a previous one brought by the Authors Guild on behalf of Grisham and others, would result in “inconsistent rulings in overlapping class actions” and would be a waste of court resources.
Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, along with Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI’s ChatGPT in July 2023, claiming copyright infringement. The lawsuit alleged that when ChatGPT generates summaries of the authors’ work, it reveals the use of copyrighted content in its training.
The plaintiffs in California also asserted that the New York lawsuits allowed OpenAI to engage in “forum shopping” and “procedural gamesmanship.”
The authors in California informed the court that the New York cases closely resemble their own, suggesting that OpenAI is seeking more favorable conditions in New York after the California court rejected its proposed litigation schedule.
Several groups of copyright owners, including writers, visual artists, and music publishers, have filed lawsuits against tech companies like OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, alleging the misuse of their work to train generative AI systems.
OpenAI, Meta, and others argue that their AI training falls under the transformative category and is protected by fair use copyright doctrine. Meta cited legal precedents, such as Google’s book copying for search, which was deemed fair use in the Authors Guild vs. Google case in 2015.
In September 2023, a professional organization for published writers based in New York, led by the Authors Guild and including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, George Saunders, and Jonathan Franzen, joined a proposed class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the misuse of copyrighted material in the training of its AI models.
The NYT subsequently filed additional complaints. The lawsuit invoked both the U.S. Constitution and the Copyright Act to defend the original journalism produced by the newspaper.
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