Judges in New York and Ontario ruled against both companies in separate lawsuits.
Two major copyright infringement lawsuits against artificial intelligence (AI) companies Cohere and OpenAI are not moving forward.
“This decision is the first step towards justice for these publishers.”
A judge in the Southern District of New York completely rejected Toronto-based AI scale-up Cohere's motion to dismiss the lawsuit this week, a week after OpenAI. lost his own movement dismiss the case in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
Major North American media companies, including The Atlantic, Condé Nast, Forbes and the Toronto Star, sued Cohere. earlier this year for alleged copyright infringement. The group is seeking damages, including up to $150,000 for each infringed work, as well as a court order barring the company from using copyrighted works to train or fine-tune its artificial intelligence models.
Koger moved to dismiss the claims of direct and secondary copyright infringement, stating that court documentsthat many of the summaries of its Command AI model do not copy any protected expression because it “incorporates abstract facts into new and original sentences.”
“Cohere's contention that the only similarity to the publishers' works is Command's use of the same facts is belied by the publishers' statements and examples showing that Command's output directly copies and pastes entire paragraphs of the publishers' articles verbatim,” the judge wrote.
The court found no merit in Cohere's arguments and found that the publishers had adequately argued that Cohere's artificial intelligence model directly violated the publishers' rights.
“This decision is the first step toward justice for these publishers, who deserve the full legal protections the law offers for their intellectual property,” Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, an industry group of which the plaintiffs are members, said in a statement.
A Cohere spokesperson told BetaKit that the company does not comment on active litigation.
CONNECTED: OpenAI pushes Canadian publishers' copyright lawsuit to be heard in US
Meanwhile, US AI giant OpenAI is fighting a lawsuit across the border filed by last year Canada's largest news companies: Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC/Radio-Canada.
The group is seeking damages, including profits made by OpenAI from the alleged infringement, as well as an injunction to prevent future use of its content. These damages could include up to $20,000 per allegedly infringed work, and the lawsuit says there are more than 10 million works in total since 2015.
In September OpenAI insisted on the claim be heard on home soil in the United States, arguing that its models were trained outside of Ontario and should not be subject to the Canadian Copyright Act. A judge denied that request last week.
“Defendants have not met their burden of establishing that the United States is a clearly more appropriate, appropriate and convenient forum than Ontario for the determination of the asserted claims of copyright infringement and related matters under Ontario law,” the judge ruled.
When reached for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson told BetaKit that its models “promote innovation, are trained on publicly available data, and are based on fair use principles.”
This is not the only lawsuit OpenAI is facing alleging copyright infringement, but it is the first of its kind in Canada. New York Times made similar allegations against OpenAI and its backer, Microsoft, which combined with a separate claim by US authors. OpenAI also fought a music copyright lawsuit in Germany that it lost This week.
Image courtesy of Toronto Technology Week.
