From today's Publishers Lunch
Julian Sancton, author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night, has filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft on behalf of other nonfiction authors, citing copyright infringement in training ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and other generative AI tools.
Unlike other similar suits, this one focuses on the work of nonfiction authors, and is the first to name Microsoft as a defendant. Like other suits, this one asserts that the tech companies are making a profit—the complaint quotes an OpenAI report that it is making $1.3 billion per year—from the use of copyrighted works, without paying the creators for their use.
"Defendants’ commercial success was possible only because they copied and digested the protected, copyrightable expression contained in billions of pages of actual text, across millions of copyrighted works—all without paying a penny to authors and rightsholders," the complaint reads.
The suit also claims that OpenAI and Microsoft have collaborated on "developing and monetizing" their generative AI products.
Julian Sancton, author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night, has filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft on behalf of other nonfiction authors, citing copyright infringement in training ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and other generative AI tools.
Unlike other similar suits, this one focuses on the work of nonfiction authors, and is the first to name Microsoft as a defendant. Like other suits, this one asserts that the tech companies are making a profit—the complaint quotes an OpenAI report that it is making $1.3 billion per year—from the use of copyrighted works, without paying the creators for their use.
"Defendants’ commercial success was possible only because they copied and digested the protected, copyrightable expression contained in billions of pages of actual text, across millions of copyrighted works—all without paying a penny to authors and rightsholders," the complaint reads.
The suit also claims that OpenAI and Microsoft have collaborated on "developing and monetizing" their generative AI products.