ChatGPT Copyright Claim Dismissed in Court Battle

A US judge has thrown out many of the ChatGPT copyright claim filed against AI startup OpenAI by authors who accused the company’s chatbot ChatGPT of infringing on their copyrighted works. While the ruling is a win for OpenAI, the legal battle is far from over.

Authors including bestselling writer Michael Chabon had argued that OpenAI used pirated copies of their books to train ChatGPT without permission. This constituted a ChatGPT copyright claim violation as the AI system was essentially repackaging their original content in its responses.

OpenAI denied the allegations and filed a motion to dismiss most of the claims. In her ruling, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín agreed that the authors had failed to provide sufficient evidence. For their accusations except for direct copyright infringement on a small number of outputs.

What’s next in The Legal Showdown?

While the authors now have to redo their case to back up the dismissed ChatGPT copyright claim allegations. It’s still anyone’s game. They’ll need to show ChatGPT outputs that are too similar to their books to convince the court the AI was improperly trained on pirated works. OpenAI is confident it can defeat the remaining direct infringement argument later. Both sides have until mid-March to amend their positions before the legal fight continues.

The ruling clarified that simply alleging “every ChatGPT response infringes copyright” is not enough to prove ChatGPT copyright claim violations like vicarious infringement. The judge signaled authors must demonstrate outputs that are substantially similar to or directly copy from their copyrighted works. With no end in sight, the court battle could help shape how AI is regulated and copyrighted works are used for machine learning in the future.