Nikita Osadchiy , The Heights; BC Professor Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over Use Of Copyrighted Textbooks
"A Boston College finance professor is among six textbook authors suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging the companies downloaded their books from pirate websites and used them without authorization to train their large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT.
“OpenAI reproduced Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s Works without authorization by downloading them from shadow libraries, copying them into datasets and computer memory, converting them into training-ready formats, and copying them into the materials used to train their LLMs and ChatGPT,” the textbook authors argued in their complaint.
The suit seeks to represent every textbook author whose copyrighted work OpenAI or Microsoft allegedly copied.
Alan Marcus, the Mario J. Gabelli endowed professor of finance at the Carroll School of Management, filed the proposed class-action lawsuit on Aug. 14 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alongside five current and former professors from across the country.
The plaintiffs name Microsoft in the lawsuit for its role in building the infrastructure on which OpenAI trained its models and profiting by building those models into products like Bing Chat and Copilot, the complaint alleges."
