Lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement by Britannica and Merriam-Webster

Both Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing it of widespread copyright violations, in the latest legal escalation between AI companies and the publishing sector.
The lawsuit accuses the company of using nearly 100,000 articles from the content of the two platforms without permission, as part of training AI models, noting that the outputs produced by these models may include full or partial copies of the original materials.
The lawsuit also addressed the use of techniques that rely on retrieving information from the internet and databases, considering that this approach not only reproduces content but may also lead to distortion or attribution of inaccurate information to reliable sources, which could constitute a violation of trademark laws, including the Lanham Act.
The complaint indicates that AI systems, including the ChatGPT application, negatively affect publishers' business models by providing direct answers to users that reduce the need to visit the original sites, leading to a decline in revenues.
This lawsuit joins a growing series of cases filed by media institutions and publishers against AI companies, amid ongoing legal debate over whether the use of protected content in training models constitutes infringement or lawful transformative use.
Despite varying preliminary rulings in some cases, the legal framework governing this issue remains unresolved, making these lawsuits likely to play a pivotal role in determining the future relationship between AI technologies and the digital content industry.