Authors Sue Microsoft, OpenAI Over AI Copyright Claims

Microsoft and OpenAI have been sent yet another complaint alleging that they have violated copyright laws.

Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage, both of whom are authors of nonfiction, filed a lawsuit against the two firms, saying that the defendants had stolen their copyrighted works to assist in the development of their artificial intelligence application.

One week after The New York Times filed a similar copyright infringement complaint against Microsoft and OpenAI, Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage, both authors of nonfiction, submitted the action in a federal court in Manhattan on Friday, January 5.

The complaint argues that the firms utilized the newspaper’s material to train AI chatbots. The most recent legal action has been taken after OpenAI admitted that copyright owners, including the plaintiffs, should be compensated for the use of their work.

The New York Times lawsuit is seeking damages in the amount of “billions of dollars.” The Basbanes and Gage lawsuit, as stated in the filing, demands damages of up to one hundred fifty thousand dollars for each instance of copyright infringement.

The New York Times recently published an article in which it stated, “We respect the rights of content creators and owners and are committed to working with them to ensure that they benefit from artificial intelligence technology and new revenue models.”

OpenAI and Microsoft were named as defendants in the case. Authors such as George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, George Saunders, and Jonathan Franzen are among the members of a New York-based professional association for published writers that came together in September to join a planned class-action lawsuit against OpenAI.

The Authors Guild is the organization that organized the group. Julian Sancton, another author, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the latter used the nonfiction author’s work without permission to train artificial intelligence models.

The creator of the popular chatbot ChatGPT is facing a second class-action lawsuit in the state of California. The claim pertains to allegations that the creator scraped confidential user information from the internet.

On June 28, 2023, the case was submitted by Clarkson Law Firm to the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

According to the allegations made in the lawsuit, OpenAI trained ChatGPT by using data obtained from millions of social network comments, blog posts, Wikipedia pages, and family recipes without obtaining the agreement of the users of those platforms.