On Thursday, a New York federal court judge dismissed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence giant OpenAI that claimed OpenAI used articles from news organizations Raw Story and AlterNet without permission while training its large-scale language model, IPEconomy has learned from overseas media outlet Reuters. (Case No. 1:24-cv-01514)

On February 28 of this year, digital news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI, in which the two media organizations said that thousands of their article stories were used without permission to train OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, and that ChatGPT reproduced their copyrighted material when users asked questions.

The case is part of a series of lawsuits OpenAI and other tech companies have faced from subjects such as authors, visual artists, music publishers, and other copyright holders over the data used to train generative AI systems.2023 The lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI in December was the first to come from a media organization.

Unlike the other cases, however, the Raw Story and AlterNet's complaint in this case alleges that OpenAI unlawfully removed copyright management information (CMI) from their articles without claiming that this infringed their copyrights. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon sided with OpenAI and held that the complaint should be dismissed.

Judge McMahon noted, “Let's be clear about what the real dispute is. The alleged harm for which plaintiffs are really seeking relief is not CMI's deletion, but the use of plaintiffs' articles to train ChatGPT without compensation.”

Judge McMahon said that the two news organizations had failed to show that they had suffered sufficient damages to support the lawsuit, but allowed the plaintiffs to file a new complaint, although she was “skeptical” that the plaintiffs would be able to “assert cognizable damages.” Moreover, she added, “it remains to be seen whether there are other statutory provisions or legal theories that would elevate such damages to the level of actionable damages. But that issue is not before the court today.”

Raw Story's attorney said the news organization is “fully confident that the issues identified by the court will be resolved through the amended complaint.”

A spokesperson and attorney for OpenAI did not immediately respond.