Manhattan Court consolidated Openai Copyright cases from writers, NYT
An American judicial panel decided to transfer several copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft to New York, which consolidates the cases of authors such as Ta-Nehi Kotts and John Grisham, as well as news outlets such as New York Times. In cases, it has been claimed that the AI models use copyright material without permission.
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An American judicial panel on Thursday decided to consolidate in New York, with major authors and OpenAII and its biggest backer Microsoft MSFT.O.
On the orders of multidistrect litigation, the US judicial panel included Ta-Nehi Kotts, comedian Sarah Silverman and California’s cases brought by other authors of the Manhatan Federal Court, including New York Times Nyt.n and John Grisom, Jonathan Franzen and George Rr Martin, including the same affairs.
Openai proposed to consolidate cases in northern California, while most of the plaintiff opposed centralizing the cases.
“We welcome this development and are ready to clarify in the court that our models are trained on publicly available data, are based in proper use, and are in support of innovation,” said a spokesman of OpenAII.
Representatives and lawyers for Microsoft, Times and writers did not immediately respond to the requests for commenting on the decision.
Cases are part of the high-day litigation wave against technical companies including Openai, Microsoft and Meta platforms of the cases, alleging that companies used their content without permission to train the AI system.
Judges are currently beginning to consider whether technical companies are immune to allegations based on the “Fair Use” principle of the US Copyright Act, which allows for unauthorized use of copyright functions in some circumstances.
Openai last year asked the panel to add 12 cases to the authors and news outlets to add 12 cases to the same case, arguing that they “stems from the same underlying allegations: that Openai has used the plaintiff’s copyright to train some big language models.” The plaintiff argued that his cases were very different for justifying him to centralize him.
The panel said on Thursday that the involvement of American District Judge Sydney Stein in the cases will “serve the convenience of parties and witnesses and promote the justified and efficient conduct of this litigation.”
Stein currently presides over the New York Affairs brought by the authors and the Times.