Is Winter Coming for OpenAI?
Judge Stein denies OpenAI's motion to dismiss. Game of Thrones summary generated by ChatGPT is potentially infringing.
Judge Stein issued his order denying OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the Class Plaintiffs’ claim as to infringing outputs. Judge Stein found sufficient allegations to state a claim.
Although OpenAI will get another shot at defeating the output claim later in its motion for summary judgment, OpenAI will now have to defend against at least 3 different claims of infringement:
use of Shadow Libraries and downloading of pirated copies of books,
use to train its AI models, and
outputs of AI models.
OpenAI was hoping to knock out the third claim against outputs — which would then make the case similar to both Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta, neither of which included any alleged infringing outputs.
In his ruling, Judge Stein used an example of a summary generated for Game of Thrones: “the output summarizing George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones from his A Song of Ice and Fire book series”:
Judge Stein concluded:
There is no doubt that a reasonable jury applying the more discerning observer test could determine that this output is substantially similar to Martin’s original work based on the output’s incorporation of such copyrightable elements of Martin’s original work as setting, plot, and characters.
-Judge Stein
But the court also noted some of the other works allegedly infringed “are, by and large, significantly less detailed than the two examples set forth above.”
And the court did not consider any fair use defense at this early stage of a motion to dismiss.
Download Judge Stein’s opinion here.