The dictionary sues OpenAI
Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging their content was used to train AI models without permission.Summary
Encyclopedia Britannica, the owner of Merriam-Webster, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming “massive copyright infringement” due to the unauthorized scraping and use of nearly 100,000 of its online articles to train OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs). The lawsuit also alleges copyright violations when OpenAI’s ChatGPT generates outputs that directly reproduce Britannica’s content or utilizes its articles within its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflow. Furthermore, Britannica accuses OpenAI of violating the Lanham Act by fabricating information and falsely attributing it to the publisher. The publisher argues that ChatGPT undermines revenue for web publishers and threatens the availability of trustworthy information. This legal action joins similar suits filed by The New York Times, Ziff Davis, and numerous other news organizations. While the legality of using copyrighted material for LLM training remains uncertain, previous cases have yielded mixed results, with one judge finding the training itself transformative but penalizing illegal content acquisition.
(Source：TechCrunch)