This week saw yet another California federal court dismiss copyright and related claims arising out of the training and output of a generative AI model in Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc.,[1]a putative class action filed on behalf of a group of authors alleging that OpenAI infringed their copyrighted literary works by using them to train ChatGPT.[2] OpenAI moved to dismiss all claims against it, save the claim for direct copyright infringement, and the court largely sided with OpenAI.
On November 28, 2023, U.S. District Judge Fred W. Slaughter for the Central District of California granted motions for summary judgment against a screenwriter’s claims that the creation of Ad Astra, the 2019 Brad Pitt film, had infringed on a script he had written.[1] The Court reasoned that the defendant companies could not have possibly copied the script in question, as they did not have access to the script until after Ad Astra was written. Additionally, the court stated, the two films were significantly different so as to conclude there was no infringement, even if it could be shown there was access.
On October 19, 2023, the U.S. Copyright Office announced in the Federal Register that it will consider a proposed exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (“DMCA”) anti-circumvention provisions which prohibit the circumvention of any technological measures used to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works. The exemption would allow those researching bias in artificial intelligence (“AI”) to bypass any technological measures that limit the use of copyrighted generative AI models.