Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam‑Webster have filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI in Manhattan federal court, alleging that ChatGPT was trained on nearly 100,000 encyclopedia articles and dictionary entries without authorization. The publishers argue that their subscription‑based, professionally edited reference material was scraped and used to build AI models, enabling ChatGPT to reproduce or even hallucinate Britannica‑like passages. They claim this infringes copyright, diverts traffic from their platforms, and risks confusing users about the source of information. The case highlights growing legal battles over whether large‑scale data scraping for AI training qualifies as fair use or requires licensing agreements.
by rrollins
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