Classic reference giant Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster have recently formally filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing OpenAI of unauthorized misuse of their copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence models.
The complaint states that Microsoft-backed OpenAI illegally copied nearly 100,000 online articles, encyclopedia entries, and dictionary entries to train its flagship product ChatGPT. The plaintiff emphasized that the content summaries generated by ChatGPT are "almost word for word" the same as the original works of Encyclopedia Britannica. This behavior not only constitutes copyright infringement but also uses AI-generated content to "erode" the traffic of the original website, leading to user loss.
In addition, the lawsuit also involves trademark infringement allegations. The plaintiff claims that OpenAI improperly references Encyclopedia Britannica in its AI-generated "hallucinations," misleading the public into believing that the generated content is officially authorized.
Currently, Encyclopedia Britannica is demanding economic compensation from OpenAI and requesting the court to issue an injunction to prevent further infringement. This case is another major move by Encyclopedia Britannica to protect intellectual property rights, following its previous lawsuit against Perplexity AI. It also reflects the latest development in the copyright battle between content creators and AI technology giants. In response to such lawsuits, AI companies generally argue that their use of copyrighted content falls under "fair use."
