USA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Anne Shea Gaza, Adam W Poff, Pilar G Kraman and Robert M Vrana, Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor, LLP
ing, and several lawsuits brought by these own - ers have already been filed. Most prominently in print journalism, the New York Times chose to litigate rather than strike a deal. Prominent cases that have been filed to date include the following: • Andersen v Stability AI Ltd. (N.D. Cal. 2023): (a) Class action filed by visual artists against generative AI image model. (b) On 12 August 2024, the court granted motions to dismiss claims under the Digi - tal Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The court denied motion to dismiss claims under the Copyright Act and Lanham Act, and for unjust enrichment. (c) The parties are currently engaged in discovery. • Doe v Github, Inc. (N.D. Cal. 2022): (a) Class action filed by anonymous plaintiffs against Microsoft, OpenAI, and GitHub regarding use of copyrighted material to train coding-assistant AI, Copilot. (b) On 24 June 2024, the court granted mo - tions to dismiss claims under the DMCA, but did not dismiss claims related to violations of open-source licences. • Silverman v Open AI, Inc. (N.D. Cal. 2023): (a) In several consolidated cases, including one brought by comedian Sarah Silver - man, authors filed complaints against OpenAI for copyright infringement, DMCA violations, and various torts. (b) The parties currently are engaged in discovery. • Kadrey v Meta Platforms, Inc. (N.D. Cal. 2023): (a) Some of the same plaintiffs from Silver - man also filed cases against Meta regard - ing Meta’s use of their copyrighted works to train its LLaMA model.
(b) The parties currently are engaged in discovery. • Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v ROSS Intelligence Inc. (D. Del. 2021): (a) Thomson Reuters sued ROSS Intelli - gence, which had trained an AI-powered legal research platform based on legal research memoranda created using summarised points of law from Thomson Reuters’ platform. (b) The parties completed discovery and a trial was continued in August 2024, with the court instead scheduling a summary judgment hearing for December 2024. • The New York Times Co. v Microsoft Corp. et al. (S.D.N.Y., 2023): (a) The New York Times brought suit, alleg - ing that its copyrighted news content was used to train generative AI models including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. The complaint includes allegations that ChatGPT recited certain articles verbatim or very closely, and falsely attributed other output as a New York Times article. (b) The parties currently are engaged in discovery. As indicated by the cases filed to date, owners of copyrighted content may be the most directly implicated by, and therefore the most concerned about, AI models trained on their intellectual prop - erty. But even for businesses that do not think of themselves as media companies specialising in copyrighted content, a business’ name, image, logo, or other trade mark may also be at risk of infringement by generative AI models. Businesses and counsel will want to monitor closely these cas - es and others for clues regarding the application of copyright and trade mark law to generative AI models, particularly with the US Supreme Court’s renewed interest on placing boundaries on the fair use of trade marks and copyrighted works.
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