MANHATTAN (CN) — A group of authors with copyright class actions pending in San Francisco federal court against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Microsoft won't be allowed to intervene in a similar consolidated group of copyright cases over the generative text chatbot underway in Manhattan court, a New York federal judge ruled Monday.
Authors and journalists — across four pending civil cases that have been consolidated in Manhattan federal court since last fall — accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of infringing copyrights when training their large language models to develop algorithms that allow anyone to generate similar texts they would otherwise pay writers to create.
But Senior U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein ruled in a 7-page opinion issued Monday that plaintiffs in a group of similar cases on the opposite coast couldn't intervene and possibly delay the New York suits, finding that the California plaintiffs didn't have a interest in the New York actions.
“More importantly, for the claims that do overlap, the California plaintiffs have no legally cognizable interest in avoiding rulings that apply to entirely different plaintiffs in a different district. Critically, no class has been certified in any of the New York or California actions, so each group of plaintiffs only has a direct and cognizable interest in its own proceeding,” the Bill Clinton-appointed judge wrote, noting that class certification briefing in the California case is not scheduled to be completed until June 2025.
Stein also disagreed that the cases in the different districts may contradict one another, writing, "The substantial differences between the actions lessen any risk of contradictory rulings. For example, the California plaintiffs assert state-law and DMCA claims that are not raised in the Author Actions and Microsoft is not a defendant in the California action."
The first of these cases to be filed in the Southern District of New York was brought by the Authors Guild professional organization for writers on September 19, 2023. The Authors Guild was joined by 17 other authors on the lawsuit, including “Game of Thrones” creator George R.R. Martin and authors Elin Hilderbrand, Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult.
The New York Times filed a suit four months later in the same court seeking to curb OpenAI’s practice of using the newspaper’s stories to train its chatbots.
Stein subsequently consolidated the Authors Guild and New York Times’ cases with two others. Fact discovery now underway is due be completed by September 2024, and summary judgment briefing is due in early 2025.
Microsoft, the Authors Guild and the New York Times all opposed the California plaintiffs’ motion to intervene in the New York case.
Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday afternoon.
The coalition of authors who sued OpenAI in the Northern District of California last year includes Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Junot Diaz.
Comedian and author Sarah Silverman and two other authors brought an earlier complaint against OpenAI in San Francisco federal court claiming ChatGPT can accurately summarize their books when prompted, and say they didn't give OpenAI permission to use their copyrighted books to train ChatGPT.
In February, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted OpenAI’s motion to dismiss certain counts from Silverman’s complaint, ruling that the writers failed to demonstrate a substantial similarity between ChatGPT's outputs and the copyrighted materials, although their unfairness claims under California's unfair competition law can proceed.
Last week, OpenAI unveiled its new voice cloning technology — Voice Engine — just over a week after filing a trademark application for the name.
The company claims that the text-to-speech software can “generate natural-sounding speech that closely resembles” a speaker’s voice with just 15 seconds of recording of that person talking.
OpenAI says it plans to preview it with early testers “but not widely release this technology at this time” because of the dangers of misuse.
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