Major Publishers From The Guardian To Condé Nast Sue AI Startup For Copyright Violation In Latest Salvo

deadline.com:

Fourteen publishers have sued Canadia artificial intelligence firm Cohere for widespread unauthorized use of their content in developing and running its generative AI systems, alleging massive, systematic copyright and trademark infringement.

It’s the latest legal salvo in the battle between content providers and generative AI models that digest their text and spit it back to users often word for word, including articles behind a paywall.

The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, says Cohere has infringed on thousands of articles and seeks a permanent injunction, jury trial and damages of up to $150k  per work infringed. “This is a lawsuit to protect journalism from systematic copyright and trademark infringement,” says the suit by Advance Local Media, Condé Nast, The Atlantic, Forbes Media, The Guardian, Business Insider, LA Times, McClatchy Media Company, Newsday, Plain Dealer Publishing Company, Politico, The Republican Company, Toronto Star Newspapers and Vox Media, all members of trade association News/Media Alliance. “Rather than create its own content, Cohere takes the creative output of Publishers, some of the largest, most enduring, and most important news, magazine, and digital publishers in the United States and around the world.

Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles … to power its artificial intelligence (“AI”) service, which in turn competes with Publisher offerings and the emerging market for AI licensing.” The burgeoning field of generative AI require huge amounts of content to train its models, resulting in increasingly frequent litigation.