Dictionary against OpenAI | Results TechCrunch

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, he said complaint that the AI ​​giant has committed “serious copyright infringement.”

Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster, has the copyright to about 100,000 online articles, which were dumped and used to teach OpenAI LLMs without permission, the publisher says in the lawsuit.

Britannica also accuses OpenAI of violating copyright laws when it publishes output that contains “all or part of its text” and when the AI ​​lab uses its text in ChatGPT’s RAG (restoring augmented generation) work schedule. OpenAI’s RAG tool is how LLM scans the Internet or other databases to find information that has been updated in response to a query. Britannica also claims that OpenAI is violating the Lanham Act, a trademark law, when it makes artificial representations and makes false claims to the publisher.

“ChatGPT deprives website publishers like (Britannica) of revenue by providing answers to user queries that replace, and directly compete with, content from publishers like (Britannica),” the lawsuit reads. Britannica also notes that ChatGPT’s protests threaten “people’s continued access to high-quality and reliable information on the Internet.”

Britannica has joined several other publishers and authors in pursuing legal action against OpenAI on copyright issues. The New York Times, Ziff Davis (owner of Mashable, CNET, IGN, PC Mag, and others), and more than a dozen newspaper across the US and Canadaincluding the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, the Sun Sentinel, the Toronto Star, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, criticized OpenAI.

A similar cases to Britannica against Perplexity is still waiting.

There are no hard and fast rules to determine whether the use of copyrighted material in LLM teaching is a violation of the law. But in one exampleAnthropic successfully convinced federal judge William Alsup that this use case — using the content as training data — is revolutionary enough to be legal. However, Alsup said that Anthropic violated the law by illegally downloading millions of books, instead of paying for them, causing the affected authors to pay back $1.5 billion.

OpenAI did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment before publication.