Encyclopedia Britannica & Merriam-Webster Sue OpenAI for Copyright

Two pillars of reference publishing, Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging widespread copyright infringement. The suit claims OpenAI used nearly 100,000 of their copyrighted articles to train its large language models, including ChatGPT, without permission or compensation. A central allegation is that ChatGPT can generate responses that are "substantially similar" to the proprietary content from these reference works. The publishers argue this constitutes direct copying and undermines their business. This lawsuit adds significant weight to the growing legal battle over the use of copyrighted data for AI training, pitting the traditional content-creation industry against the new paradigm of AI development that relies on ingesting vast amounts of existing information.