OpenAI sued by George RR Martin, John Grisham, others for copyright infringement
Leon Neal
OpenAI, the maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT and backed by billions of dollars from Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), was sued in a New York federal court on Tuesday by a number of authors, including George R.R. Martin and John Grisham over alleged copyright infringement.
The authors, which include Martin, known for his epic fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire, Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, and Sylvia Day, are being represented by firms Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP and Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP. 
The firms filed a class action suit on behalf of the Authors Guild and said that OpenAI "copied the plaintiffsâ works wholesale, without permission or consideration" and fed the work into the large language models used to train its services.
"Without plaintiffsâ and the proposed classâ copyrighted works, Defendants would have a vastly different commercial productâ, stated Rachel Geman, Lieff Cabraser partner and co-counsel for plaintiffs and the proposed class, in a statement. "Defendantsâ decision to copy authorsâ works, done without offering any choices or any compensation, threatens the role and livelihood of writers as a whole."
OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT) did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.

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