Photo credit: arstechnica.com
Condé Nast, alongside several prominent media organizations, has initiated legal proceedings against AI startup Cohere, alleging significant violations of copyright and trademark laws. The complaint asserts that Cohere has systematically utilized news articles without authorization to train its large language model, constituting “systematic copyright and trademark infringement.”
The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, highlights that Cohere has been leveraging copied content from their articles to enhance its artificial intelligence service, which purportedly competes with the publishing sector. The media companies claim that, beyond merely utilizing their works without consent, Cohere is also creating false articles and misattributing them to established publishers, damaging their reputations and misleading the audience.
Condé Nast, the parent company of several well-known entities such as Ars Technica, Wired, and The New Yorker, is joined in this lawsuit by an array of major publications, including The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Insider, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, Newsday, The Plain Dealer, Politico, The Republican, the Toronto Star, and Vox Media.
The legal action seeks statutory damages amounting to $150,000 for each instance of infringement, as stipulated in the Copyright Act, with an alternative demand for compensation based on actual damages and the profits accrued by Cohere. Additionally, the complaint requests the recovery of actual damages, Cohere’s profits, and statutory damages to the full extent of the law regarding trademark violations and misleading representations.
In Exhibit A, the plaintiffs have outlined over 4,000 instances of alleged infringement, designating it as an “illustrative and non-exhaustive list” of affected works. Accompanying exhibits include specific query responses as well as “hallucinated articles,” which the publishers contend violate their intellectual property rights. The lawsuit claims that Cohere has misrepresented its fabricated content as authentic works created by the publishers.
Cohere’s Response to Allegations
Cohere has publicly dismissed the lawsuit, describing it as frivolous. In a statement to Ars Technica, the company asserted, “Cohere strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI. We have long prioritized controls that mitigate the risk of IP infringement and respect the rights of holders. We would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns—and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach—rather than learning about them in a filing. We believe this lawsuit is misguided and frivolous, and expect this matter to be resolved in our favor.”
Source
arstechnica.com