Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster Sue OpenAI Over Unauthorized Scraping of Nearly 100,000 Articles
Summary
Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping nearly 100,000 articles without authorization to train its AI models, while also accusing the company of trademark violations and revenue harm through AI-generated responses that replace their original content.
Key Points
- Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue OpenAI, alleging massive copyright infringement over the unauthorized scraping of nearly 100,000 online articles used to train its large language models.
- OpenAI also faces accusations of violating the Lanham Act by generating hallucinated content falsely attributed to Britannica, and of harming publishers by substituting their content with AI-generated responses that cut into their revenue.
- The lawsuit adds to a growing wave of legal action against OpenAI from major publishers, joining suits from The New York Times, Ziff Davis, and numerous newspapers across the U.S. and Canada, while a similar Britannica case against Perplexity remains pending.