Another lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI. This time, Encyclopædia Britannica took legal action against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright and trademark infringement, as first reported reuters. More specifically, Britannica alleged that OpenAI illegally used “large amounts of copyrighted material” when training its AI models. Not only with training, the encyclopedia company claimed that ChatGPT’s responses to user queries sometimes contained “full or partial verbatim replicas”. [Britannica’s] Copyright Article.”
Along with claims of copyright infringement, Britannica argued that OpenAI was also liable for trademark infringement. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT “generates fabricated content or ‘hallucinations’ and misrepresents the Encyclopædia Britannica”. The lawsuit does not specify an amount for monetary damages, but Britannica is also seeking an injunction to prevent OpenAI from repeating these allegations.
When contacted for comment, a spokesperson for OpenAI told Engadget that, “ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable millions of people to improve their daily lives. Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and based on fair use.”
This is not the first time that Britannica has filed a lawsuit against an AI company. In September, the company, which owns Merriam-Webster, also sued Perplexity for similar reasons. On the other hand, OpenAI is still embroiled in a legal battle the new York TimesWhich also sued the AI giant for copyright infringement.
<a href