United States District Court for the Northern District of California Dismisses Copyright Claims Against Image Generators and LLMs
Summary
On October 30, 2023, United States District Judge William Orrick (N. D. Cal.) largely granted a motion to dismiss copyright claims brought against notable AI image generators. Judge Orrick found the complaint defective for a number of reasons, including that not all training images were copyrighted (as opposed to copyrightable) and a failure to identify alleged infringement with sufficient specificity. The plaintiffs will be allowed an opportunity to amend the complaint regarding some issues—such as specifying which copyrighted images are involved and more definite allegations of whether the generated images are “substantially similar” to the original works and should be considered derivatives of those works. Judge Orrick did not dismiss allegations of direct copyright infringement based on scraping images from the internet.
