Court Allows George R.R. Martin and Other Authors to Continue AI Copyright Lawsuit Against OpenAI

A federal court has allowed authors, including Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin, to continue their copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. The case, which has been developing for nearly three years, challenges how the company uses books to train its AI models, including ChatGPT.

The authors are pursuing three main claims. The first argues that training AI on copyrighted books without permission is illegal. The second focuses on the alleged downloading of books from “shadow libraries,” which are online sources of pirated works. The third claim says some of ChatGPT’s responses are too similar to the books it was trained on.

According to court filings reported by The Hollywood Reporter, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein recently allowed the shadow library and training theories to move forward separately. “The prior class complaints asserted a cause of action for copyright infringement and alleged that OpenAI impermissibly downloaded and reproduced plaintiffs’ books,” the judge wrote.

He added that it doesn’t matter if the downloaded works were used to train AI models, the act itself could still be infringement.

This ruling gives the authors multiple ways to pursue damages, which can reach up to $150,000 per violation. The court also highlighted that ChatGPT’s output could be considered infringing. In one example, the chatbot summarized Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, describing the Night’s Watch and the White Walkers.

The judge noted that a reader could “easily conclude that this detailed summary is substantially similar” to the original work. ChatGPT was also asked to suggest alternative plotlines for the books, and the court said a jury could find that these outputs infringe on Martin’s copyright.

The lawsuit is led by attorney Justin Nelson, who also represented author Andrea Bartz in a similar case against Anthropic, another AI company. That case resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement, even though the court largely ruled in favor of Anthropic on fair use.

While the court has not decided on fair use in this case, the ruling clearly gives the authors stronger grounds to continue. The next step will be summary judgment, where the court decides which claims will go to trial.

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