Raw Story Media, Inc. v. OpenAI Inc.

# Case Brief: Raw Story Media, Inc. v. OpenAI Inc. **SDNY, No. 1:24-cv-01514 | Filed 02/28/24** --- **Plaintiff:** Raw Story Media, Inc. and AlterNet Media, Inc. — independent progressive news publishers collectively owning 400,000+ copyrighted journalism works. **Defendant:** OpenAI, Inc. and six affiliated OpenAI entities responsible for the creation, training, and commercialization of ChatGPT. **Core allegation:** OpenAI stripped copyright management information (author, title, and copyright notices) from Plaintiffs' journalism works before ingesting them into ChatGPT training sets (WebText, WebText2, Common Crawl), in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b)(1). OpenAI did so with reason to know that the removal would induce, enable, facilitate, and conceal downstream copyright infringement by ChatGPT and its users. **Asserted IP:** - 400,000+ copyrighted news articles, investigative features, and opinion columns owned by Raw Story Media, Inc. - 400,000+ copyrighted works owned by AlterNet Media, Inc. (same corpus, jointly held) - Copyright management information (author, title, copyright notices) affixed to those works per 17 U.S.C. § 1202 - *(No copyright registration numbers cited; complaint expressly notes DMCA § 1202 claims do not require registration)* **Relief sought:** Statutory damages of no less than $2,500 per violation under 17 U.S.C. § 1203, plus actual damages and disgorgement of OpenAI's profits. **Why it matters:** This case tests whether AI developers face DMCA § 1202 liability — without requiring copyright registration — for systematically scrubbing attribution data from news content at training-set ingestion, establishing a potentially low-cost, high-volume enforcement path for the entire journalism industry against LLM developers.