Judge dismisses Raw Story and AlterNet's DMCA suit against OpenAI

Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York dismissed a lawsuit brought by news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet against OpenAI, ruling that the publishers lacked Article III standing to bring their claims.

The suit had not alleged copyright infringement directly but a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Section 1202, which bars stripping copyright management information from a work. The court found the publishers had shown no concrete injury from that alone, and that their request for an injunction failed because “the likelihood that ChatGPT would produce content plagiarized from one of plaintiffs’ articles is remote” — the model was not shown to be reproducing their specific articles for users. McMahon dismissed the case without reaching the merits of the DMCA claim itself, and did so without prejudice, leaving the publishers free to refile with a more concrete injury.

The ruling was an early setback for a wave of publisher litigation against OpenAI built around training-data claims rather than output reproduction, and it clarified that pleading a bare technical DMCA violation was not enough without evidence a model’s outputs actually replicated the plaintiff’s work. It did not resolve the harder copyright-infringement claims raised in parallel suits, including the New York Times’ case against OpenAI, which turned on different legal theory and remained unresolved.