Two major lawsuits alleging copyright infringement against artificial intelligence (AI) companies Cohere and OpenAI aren’t going their way, so far.
“This decision is the first step towards justice for these publishers.”
A judge in the Southern District of New York fully rejected Toronto-based AI scaleup Cohere’s motion to dismiss its lawsuit this week, one week after OpenAI lost its own motion to dismiss its case in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
Major North American media companies, including The Atlantic, Condé Nast, Forbes, and the Toronto Star, sued Cohere earlier this year for alleged copyright infringement. The group is seeking damages, including up to $150,000 per work infringed, and a court order preventing the company from using copyrighted works to train or fine-tune its AI models.
Cohere motioned to dismiss the allegations of direct and secondary copyright infringement, arguing in court filings, that many of its Command AI model’s summaries do not copy any protectable expression because it “incorporates the abstracted facts into new and original sentences.”
“Cohere’s contention that the only similarities to Publishers’ works are Command’s use of the same facts is belied by Publishers’ allegations and examples showing that Command’s outputs directly copy and paste entire paragraphs of Publishers’ articles verbatim,” the judge wrote.
The court found no merit in Cohere’s arguments and that the publishers adequately argued that Cohere’s AI model directly infringes publishers’ content.
“This decision is the first step towards justice for these publishers, who deserve the full legal protection offered by the law for their intellectual property,” Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of News/Media Alliance, an industry group the plaintiffs are members of, said in a statement.
A Cohere spokesperson told BetaKit that the company does not comment on active litigation.
RELATED: OpenAI pushes for Canadian publishers’ copyright lawsuit to be heard in the US
Meanwhile, American AI giant OpenAI has been fighting a lawsuit on the other side of the border, filed last year by Canada’s largest news media companies: Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC/Radio-Canada.
The group is seeking damages, including profits that OpenAI has made from the alleged infringement, as well as an injunction to prevent future use of its content. These damages could include as much as $20,000 per allegedly infringed work, which the lawsuit says totals over 10 million works since 2015.
In September, OpenAI pushed for the lawsuit to be heard on its own turf, the United States, arguing that its models were trained outside of Ontario and should not be subject to Canada’s Copyright Act. Last week, a judge dismissed that motion.
“The defendants have not met their burden of demonstrating that the United States is a clearly more appropriate, suitable and convenient forum than Ontario in which to litigate the pleaded claims for breach of copyright and related matters under Ontario law,” the judge ruled.
When reached for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson told BetaKit that its models “empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in the principles of fair use.”
This is not the only lawsuit OpenAI is facing that alleges copyright infringement, but it is the first of its kind in Canada. The New York Times made comparable allegations against OpenAI and its backer, Microsoft, which was combined with a separate suit by US authors. OpenAI has also been battling a music copyright lawsuit in Germany, which it lost this week.
Feature image courtesy Toronto Tech Week.