1. Kadrey et al. v. Meta
Background: Author Richard Kadrey, comedian Silverman, and others sued Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta on July 7, 2023 in the U.S. District Court (Northern District of California) for mass infringement - i.e., unlicensed “training” of their generative AI model on millions of copyrighted works, including their own. Meta’s defense is “fair use.” The judge assigned is Judge Vince Chhabria.
At first, in November 2023, the Court dismissed the bulk of plaintiffs’ claims against Meta. But the Court gave plaintiffs a chance to amend their complaint to add a more direct link to actual harm (and they filed their amended complaint in December 2023).
Current Status: MAJOR DEVELOPMENT! Meta now faces a crime-fraud privilege exception review; and“finds” 18,000 extra documents! On February 4th, Judge Chhabria issued an order denying plaintiffs’ pending request to reopen depositions. However, the Court granted plaintiffs’ request for in camera review of documents that Meta withheld based on attorney-client privilege in order to evaluate whether the crime-fraud exception applies. The Court ordered Meta to submit documents for in camera review by 5pm on February 7th. Plaintiffs then submitted a letter directing the Court’s attention to seven documents that they believe to implicate the crime-fraud exception. Those documents were filed under seal, though plaintiffs also submitted a motion challenging what it alleges to be chronic over-designation of documents and stating that plaintiffs do not believe such measures are necessary as to those documents.
On February 7th, Meta submitted a letter to the Court explaining that, while it prepared documents to submit for in camera review, it became aware of approximately 18,000 documents which had been sequestered by its discovery vendor and never reviewed to determine if they were responsive to plaintiffs’ discovery requests. Meta resolved to produce any responsive documents from that collection by February 14th.
2. The New York Times v. Microsoft & OpenAI
Background: This is perhaps the single most closely watched litigation involving copyright owners and generative AI tech companies.
On December 27, 2023, The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement and other related claims. The Times alleges that the companies used “millions” of its copyrighted articles to train their AI models without its consent. The Times claims this has resulted in economic harm by pulling users away from their paywalled content and impacting advertising revenue. The complaint alleges several causes of action, including copyright infringement, unfair competition, and trademark dilution. In its pleadings, The Times asserts that Microsoft and OpenAI are building a “market substitute” for its news and further that their AI generates “hallucinations” based on The Times’ articles also substantially damage its reputation and brand. The Times seeks “billions of dollars of statutory and actual damages.” Microsoft and OpenAI assert the defense of “fair use” - i.e., no license, payment or consent is needed.
On September 13, 2024, the Court granted a motion to consolidate the case with another brought by the Daily News and other publications. The judge assigned to the consolidated cases i Judge Sidney Stein.
Current Status: Will the New York Attorney General intervene? As the February 13th deadline for joint status letters approaches, there may be one more twist in the works. Microsoft had previously questioned the constitutionality of New York General Business Law § 360-1 in its motion to dismiss, which Judge Stein certified to the New York Attorney General on February 3rd. Based on this certification, New York has until April 4th to determine if it will intervene in the case to argue as to the constitutionality of the relevant statute.
3. In re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation (the cases, Paul Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc., Sarah Silverman v. OpenAI, Inc., and Chabon v. OpenAI were consolidated and recaptioned to this new moniker)
Background: Comedian Sarah Silverman and other artists filed this class action lawsuit in the Northern District of California on June 28th, 2023, asserting copyright infringement claims, in addition to unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment. The plaintiffs alleged that OpenAI used their copyrighted written works to train its AI chatbot. In February, the Court dismissed most of the claims against OpenAI, rejecting plaintiffs’ argument that the content generated by ChatGPT (i.e., the “output”) infringes their copyrighted works because there is no “substantial similarity” on the “output” side of the copyright question (and, therefore, no meaningful harm). But the Court gave the plaintiffs an opportunity to amend their complaint to plead a more direct link of harm (which they later did). In July, the Court dismissed the unfair competition claim. The claim for direct infringement is the only main one that remains. The case is assigned to Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin.
Current Status: Discovery battles continue. Plaintiffs’ ongoing attempt to depose Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann continues to drag on through extended briefing on the motion to quash, and plaintiffs’ attempt to strike his declaration on behalf of OpenAI under the sham-declaration doctrine. The parties also submitted a joint discovery letter brief on February 3rd where plaintiffs argued that OpenAI must produce more documents based on additional search terms related to OpenAI’s acquisition of copyrighted works, reasons for selecting certain training data, and alleged knowledge of how their LLMs could “leak” by regurgitating data used for training in response to prompts. OpenAI opposed plaintiffs’ requests, calling plaintiffs’ new terms overbroad and arguing that plaintiffs failed to articulate any deficiencies in OpenAI’s previous productions of documents that would justify further searches.
4. Dow Jones & Co, et al v. Perplexity AI
Background: On October 21st, 2024 The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post sued generative search company Perplexity AI in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement and other related claims. A new twist in this litigation is the focus on Retrieval Augmented Generation (“RAG”) AI. RAG GenAI not only uses an LLM trained on copyrighted material to respond to individual prompts, but also goes out to the web to update itself based on the relevant query. Perplexity even said the quiet part out loud, encouraging its users to “skip the links” to the actual sources of the copyrighted content. Based on Perplexity’s RAG model, the media plaintiffs allege that Perplexity is infringing on their copyrights at the input and output stage, sometimes reproducing copyrighted content verbatim. Plaintiffs cited their parent company News Corp’s recent licensing agreement with OpenAI in explaining that GenAI technology can be developed by legitimate means.
Current Status: No substantive developments this past week. As we reported last week, Dow Jones & Co. filed its second amended complaint on January 28th, including a significant expansion of the jurisdiction and venue section in anticipation of Perplexity’s likely motion to dismiss or transfer venue. The complaint also highlights Perplexity's marketing activities in New York, including a billboard in Times Square and a Tesla Cybertruck with Perplexity's name parked in Times Square.
5. UMG Recordings v. Suno
Background: The RIAA on behalf of the major record labels filed their lawsuit in the federal district Court in Massachusetts on June 24th, 2024, for mass copyright infringement and related claims based on alleged training on their copyrighted works. Suno is a generative AI service that allows users to create digital music files based on text prompts. This is the first case brought against an AI service related to sound recordings. In their answer on August 1st, Suno argued that their actions were protected by fair use. The judge assigned is Chief Judge F. Dennis Saylor, IV.
Current Status: No substantive developments this past week. The Court accepted the parties’ stipulated source code protocol last week, together with the new case schedule. Discovery closes and expert disclosures are due this summer. Aside from discovery issues, this case is likely to be quiet until dispositive motions in December 2025.
6. Raw Story Media & Alternet v. OpenAI
Background: News publishers Raw Story Media and Alternet filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft on February 28th, 2024 in the Southern District of New York, claiming their articles were used to train the LLM that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Rather than claiming copyright infringement, the plaintiffs alleged one cause of action for violating the DMCA (which is a separate provision of the Copyright Act related to Internet content). The plaintiffs claimed that OpenAI removed the CMI from their articles, which they argue is a violation of the DMCA.
Current Status: No substantive developments this past week. As we reported recently, Raw Story Media submitted its reply in support of its request for leave to file an amended complaint. It asserted that the removal of copyright management information (CMI) by OpenAI constitutes copyright infringement, which is a recognized harm under Article III. Additionally, it claims that OpenAI unlawfully profited from this removal, which is analogous to unjust enrichment, a common-law injury. If the Court finds that standing requires dissemination, Raw Story Media requests jurisdictional discovery to determine if OpenAI disseminated their articles. With their earlier complaint dismissed in its entirety for lack of standing, this is Raw Story Media’s last chance in this lawsuit.
7. UMG Recordings v. Uncharted Labs (d/b/a Udio)
Background: This case was brought on June 24, 2024, in the Southern District of New York, by a group of major record companies against the company behind Udio, a generative AI service launched in April 2024 by a team of former researchers from Google Deepmind. Much like Suno below, Udio allows users to create digital music files based on text prompts or audio files. And as with the complaint against Suno (see below), plaintiffs rely on tests comprising targeted prompts including the characteristics of popular sound recordings — such as the decade of release, the topic, genre, and descriptions of the artist. They allege that using these prompts caused Udio's product to generate music files that strongly resembled copyrighted recordings. The claims are for direct infringement and related causes of action. The judge assigned is Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein.
Current Status: No substantive developments this past week. It looks like the Special Master is doing his job. This case remains quiet as the parties presumably work through discovery under the Special Mater’s guidance. Stay tuned for updates that may arise.
8. Concord Music Group, et al. v. Anthropic
Background: UMG, Concord Music and several other major music companies sued Amazon-backed OpenAI competitor Anthropic on October 18th, 2023 in the U.S. District Court (Middle District of Tennessee). The music companies assert that Anthropic is infringing their music lyric copyrights on a massive scale by scraping the entire web to train its AI, essentially sucking up their copyrighted lyrics into its vortex – all without any licensing, consent or payment. In its response, Anthropic claimed fair use. The case was transferred to the Northern District of California on June 26th, 2024 and closed in Tennessee. The judge assigned is Judge Eumi K. Lee. The parties have not yet had a case management conference.
Current Status: No substantive developments this past week. Last week, the upcoming case management conference before Judge Lee was reset for March 12th. We still don’t’ have a ruling on Anthropic’s motion to dismiss, which the Court heard on December 19, 2024. It could be that the Court pushed the case management hearing because it has some plans for the dismissal ruling.
9. Sarah Andersen v. Stability AI
Background: Visual artists filed this putative class action on January 13th, 2023, alleging direct and induced copyright infringement, DMCA violations, false endorsement and trade dress claims based on the creation and functionality of Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and DreamStudio, Midjourney Inc.’s generative AI tool, and DeviantArt’s DreamUp. On August 12th, 2024, the Court dismissed many of the claims in the plaintiffs’ first amended complaint, leaving the claims for direct copyright infringement, trademark, trade dress, and inducement. The assigned judge is Judge William H. Orrick.
Current Status: No substantive developments this past week. A hearing was previously set for December 17th, 2025 regarding the parties’ jointly filed Case Management Report, which mostly featured disagreements regarding the Second Amended Complaint and minor discovery disputes. The Court reset the hearing for May 6th, 2025. No word yet on why such a significant delay.
10. Getty Images v. Midjourney and Stability AI
Background: Getty Images filed this lawsuit against image generator Stability AI on February 2nd, 2023, accusing the company of infringing more than 12 million photographs, their associated captions and metadata, in building and offering Stable Diffusion and DreamStudio. Getty’s claims are similar to those in The New York Times v. Microsoft & OpenAI case above, but here they are in the context of visual images instead of written articles - i.e., unlicensed scraping by their AI with an intent to compete directly with, and profit from, Getty Images (i.e., market substitution). This case also includes trademark infringement allegations arising from the accused technology’s ability to replicate Getty Images’ watermarks in the AI outputs. Getty filed its Second Amended Complaint on July 8th, 2024, and the parties are currently engaged in jurisdictional discovery related to defendants’ motion to transfer the case to the Northern District of California. The judge assigned is Judge Jennifer L. Hall.
Current Status: Still no update for Getty. Still nothing new since November 25th, 2024, when Getty explained its frustration with Stability AI’s refusal to participate in discovery or participate in a Rule 26(f) conference. As we recounted last week, this case is unlikely to go anywhere until the Court rules on pending jurisdictional issues.
11. The Intercept Media v. OpenAI
Background: The Intercept Media, a news publisher represented by the same firm that represents the plaintiffs in the Raw Story Media litigation below, filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft on February 28th, 2024 in the Southern District of New York, the same day Raw Story Media commenced their suit. Like the Raw Story allegations, The Intercept alleged that their articles were used to train ChatGPT and brought claims for the removal of the copyright management information (“CMI”) from the articles.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. Nothing new since OpenAI filed their answer to The Intercept’s First Amended Complaint on December 6th. OpenAI presented 10 affirmative defenses, including fair use, several equitable doctrines, statute of limitations, lack of mitigation, and failure to state a claim.
12. The Center for Investigative Reporting v. OpenAI
Background: The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal, sued Microsoft and OpenAI for essentially the same claims made in The New York Times case above.
Current Status: Motion to consolidate recently granted! Microsoft and OpenAI asked the court to consolidate this case with NY Times v. Microsoft & OpenAI, and — and, as indicated above, the Magistrate granted the motion to consolidate on October 30th (refer to the activity discussed above).
13. The Authors Guild, et al. v. OpenAI
Case Background. The Authors Guild and seventeen individual authors (including John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Nicholas A. Basbanes) filed a putative class-action suit against OpenAI on September 19th, 2023. The plaintiffs claimed that OpenAI trained its ChatGPT LLM by copying their copyrighted works. The complaint brings claims under 17 U.S.C. §501 for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement. The case is assigned to Judge Ona T. Wang.
Current Status: No major substantive developments this week. We are still waiting for the court’s decision on discovery consolidation. The case seems to be on ice until then.
14. INTERNATIONAL CASE TRACKED: Canadian News Media Companies v. OpenAI
In a case similar to The New York Times v. OpenAI, Canada’s major news organizations sued OpenAI for copyright infringement on November 28th. Filed in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, the news organizations are seeking billions of dollars in compensation for the “ongoing, deliberate, and unauthorized misappropriation of the Plaintiffs’ valuable news media works.” This is the first case of its kind in Canada, and presents a new front against OpenAI, after one was opened in Germany in Gema v. OpenAI as reported last week.
See https://litigate.com/assets/uploads/Canadian-News-Media-Companies-v-OpenAI.pdf
15. INTERNATIONAL CASE TRACKED: GEMA v. OpenAI
GEMA, a German association representing more than 95,000 composers, lyricists and publishers, filed suit in German court accusing OpenAI of reproducing their members’ song lyrics without a license. Gema claims this is a test case to clarify the law in Germany, and that it aims to establish a license model that would compensate music creators whose works are used to train AI models. The details of German copyright law are a bit beyond the scope of this blog, but we did think it noteworthy that the litigation trend is catching on worldwide. While we don’t plan to track this case closely, we will watch for any momentous developments.