OpenAI faces fresh copyright lawsuit a week after NYT suit

The lawsuit by authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage follows the acknowledgment by OpenAI in its lawsuit with The New York Times that copyright owners, including the plaintiffs, should be compensated for the use of their work.

OpenAI and Microsoft have been hit with another copyright infringement lawsuit. Nonfiction authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage sued the two companies, alleging that the defendants stole their copyrighted works to help build its artificial intelligence (AI) system.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday, Jan. 5, in a Manhattan federal court, comes a week after The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in a similar copyright infringement complaint that alleges the companies used the newspaper’s content to train AI chatbots.

The latest legal action follows OpenAI’s acknowledgment that copyright owners, including the plaintiffs, should be compensated for the use of their work. The NYT lawsuit is pursuing “billions of dollars” in damages.

According to the filing, the Basbanes and Gage suit seeks damages of up to $150,000 for each copyright infringement.

In an article about its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, the NYT said, “We respect the rights of content creators and owners and are committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models.”

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In September, a New York-based professional organization for published writers led by the Authors Guild, including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen, joined a proposed class-action lawsuit against OpenAI.

Another author, Julian Sancton, is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly using the nonfiction author’s work without authorization to train AI models.

The maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT is also facing a different class-action lawsuit in California over allegedly scraping private user information from the internet. Clarkson Law Firm filed the lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on June 28, 2023.

The suit alleges that OpenAI trained ChatGPT using data collected from millions of social media comments, blog posts, Wikipedia articles and family recipes without the consent of the respective users.