More Copycat Copyright Cases Filed

April 30, 2024

United StatesU.S. Judicial & Administrative Decisions

Summary

New cases, with similar allegations to ongoing cases in the Northern District of California (N.D. Cal.) and the Southern District of New York (SDNY), were filed this month.

• On April 26, 2024, a copyright case was filed in the Northern District of California (N.D. Cal.) alleging that Google’s Imagen image generator was trained on a dataset containing copyrighted works. The complaint is similar to the other N.D. Cal. Copyright cases (e.g., the Silverman and Kadrey cases) and was filed by the same law firm representing the plaintiffs in those cases. The complaint alleges that Google used the LAION-400M image dataset, instead of the books3 text dataset at the core of the similar cases, to train Imagen. Like the complaints in the later-filed N.D. Cal. cases, the complaint in this case focuses on direct copying claims instead of derivative work theories.

• On April 30, 2024, another copyright case was filed in SDNY by several newspapers, including the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, against Microsoft and OpenAI. The complaint makes nearly identical allegations as in the New York Times (NYT) case, including outputs that are allegedly similar to the newspaper's articles, and was filed by the same law firm representing the NYT in that case. Unlike the N.D. Cal. cases, this case includes various indirect infringement theories.

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