According to judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, authors behind three separate lawsuits—including Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, and Paul Tremblay—have failed to provide evidence supporting any of their claims except for direct copyright infringement.
Among copyright claims tossed by Martínez-Olguín were accusations of vicarious copyright infringement.
Perhaps most significantly, Martínez-Olguín agreed with OpenAI that the authors' allegation that "every" ChatGPT output "is an infringing derivative work” is "insufficient" to allege vicarious infringement, which requires evidence that ChatGPT outputs are "substantially similar" or "similar at all" to authors' books.
"Plaintiffs here have not alleged that the ChatGPT outputs contain direct copies of the copyrighted books," Martínez-Olguín wrote.
Some of the remaining claims were dependent on copyright claims to survive, Martínez-Olguín wrote.
Arguing that OpenAI caused economic injury by unfairly repurposing authors' works, even if authors could show evidence of a DMCA violation, authors could only speculate about what injury was caused, the judge said.
Among the thorniest questions is whether AI tools like ChatGPT should be considered authors when spouting outputs included in creative works. »
