Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

US judge denies OpenAI bid to dismiss authors’ copyright claims over ChatGPT outputs, citing plausible substantial similarity; fair use left open

Published on: 30 October 2025

Published by a Law360 reporter

Legal News

Article summary

Although stressing that 'nothing in this opinion is intended to suggest a view on whether the allegedly infringing outputs are protected as fair uses of the original works', US District Judge, Sidney H Stein, refused OpenAI's motion to dismiss the authors' prima facie copyright infringement claim arising from ChatGPT's outputs. The lawsuit consolidates ten separate claims filed in various jurisdictions alleging that OpenAI and its financier Microsoft used copyright protected material to train the models that power ChatGPT. In his ruling, Judge Stein first concluded that the consolidated class complaint 'squarely alleges that OpenAI had access to plaintiffs' works and that ChatGPT's allegedly infringing outputs are based on plaintiffs' works'. He then further determined that 'a reasonable jury could find that the allegedly infringing outputs are substantially similar to plaintiffs' works', explaining that, although the ChatGPT-generated summaries do not capture every minor plot twist and character development in the original underlying works, 'they are most certainly attempts at abridgement or condensation of some of the central copyright protected elements of the original works such as setting, plot and characters'...

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