OpenAI was found guilty of violating California’s unfair competition law by using copyrighted books by comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors to train ChatGPT without permission. But U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín on Monday also dismissed a number of other legal claims brought by Silverman and his co-plaintiffs, including allegations of vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, negligence and unjust enrichment.
The judge gave the plaintiffs until March 13 to amend their proposed class action lawsuit to address flaws in the complaint.
The heart of the lawsuit remains because OpenAI's motion to dismiss last summer did not involve direct copyright infringement claims that Silverman copied millions of books on the Internet without permission. Courts have yet to determine whether using copyrighted works to train AI models falls within copyright law’s fair use doctrine, shielding these companies from liability.
Although Martínez-Olguín allows for unfair competition claims, she said the claim would likely be given priority by the federal Copyright Act, which prohibits state laws from raising the same infringement claims as copyright claims.
The judge, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, said: "Because OpenAI did not raise the priority issue, the court did not consider it."
The ruling mirrors Silverman’s similar copyright case in the same court against MetaPlatforms’ artificial intelligence model LLaMA. In that case, the judge dismissed most of Silverman's ancillary claims, while the direct copyright infringement claims entered the discovery phase of the case.
OpenAI is facing copyright lawsuits from dozens of authors across the country. Last year, the Writers Guild, the largest professional writers association in the United States, and the New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement in Manhattan federal court.
Joseph Saveri, Law Firm, LLP and Matthew Butterick represented Silverman and the author. Latham & Watkins LLP and Morrison & Foerster LLP represent OpenAI.
The case is called Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc., Northern District of California, No. 3:23-cv-03223, which was partially dismissed on December 2, 2024.