Bid to dismiss multi-district class action over ChatGPT outputs lost by OpenAI
Bid to dismiss multi-district class action over ChatGPT outputs lost by OpenAI
The opinion also said in a footnote however that it would have reached the same conclusion applying the less refined “ordinary observer” test.
A New York judge has ruled that OpenAI cannot stop a consolidated, multi-district class action brought against by dozens of authors for direct copyright infringement by the outputs of its large language model, ChatGPT.
The plaintiffs had failed to allege substantial similarity between the works and ChatGPT’s outputs, OpenAI argued however Judge Sidney Stein of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York reportedly said, “[a] more discerning observer could reasonably conclude that the allegedly infringing outputs are substantially similar to the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”
The test of “more discerning observer” applies when the works in question reportedly “contain both copyrightable elements—such as characters, plot, and setting…—and non-copyrightable elements—such as stock themes, stock characters, scenes a faire, and abstract ideas,” the court explained.
Reportedly per the court, under that test, “the relevant question is whether there exists ‘substantial similarity between those elements, and only those elements, that provide copyrightability to the allegedly infringed [work]’.” The opinion also said in a footnote however that it would have reached the same conclusion applying the less refined “ordinary observer” test.
Examples incorporated by reference from the Consolidated Class Action Complaint were included by the plaintiffs in their opposition to the motion to dismiss of allegedly infringing outputs such as summaries of “A Game of Thrones” author George R R Martin’s works which, despite not recounting “‘[e]very intricate plot twist and element of character development’….most certainly attempts at abridgment or condensation of some of the central copyrightable elements of the original works such as setting, plot, and characters.”
Replicating the ChatGPT output of several summaries of Martin’s works, Judge Stein reportedly concluded that “the summary conveys the overall tone and feel of the original work by parroting the plot, characters, and themes of the original.”
In a footnote, Stein also addressed OpenAI’s argument that its outputs are “analogous to the summaries of news articles that the Court determined were not substantially similar to copyrighted works in its decision in New York Times Co Versus Microsoft Corp, 777 F. Supp. 3d 283 (S.D.N.Y. 2025),” distinguishing the outputs in New York Times because they “merely summarized non-copyrightable elements of the original news article,” such as facts, and “differed in style, tone, length, and sentence structure’” from the originals.
A reasonable jury could without doubt determine that these outputs are “substantially similar to Martin’s original work based on the output’s incorporation of such copyrightable elements of Martin’s original work as setting, plot, and characters,” Stein ultimately found. The judge said that the Martin examples were sufficient to defeat OpenAI’s motion to dismiss. The judge concluded by making it clear that the opinion does not represent a view as to whether the outputs are protected under the doctrine of fair use, which courts generally do not address until the summary judgment phase.
