Metadata company Gracenote is the latest to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement
Source: Engadget
Background
AI companies have been spending a lot of time in court arguing copyright cases over the past year, and the latest plaintiff is Gracenote, the metadata company owned by Nielsen. Axios reports that Gracenote is suing OpenAI for the unauthorized and unpaid use of both its metadata and its framework for connecting that information.
Gracenote specializes in entertainment metadata, creating descriptions and identifiers for content that clients such as TV providers use to help their own customers with discovery.
Allegations
Most of the lawsuits against AI businesses have focused on the content used to train large language models, but the Gracenote case adds an extra layer by alleging infringement of the structure or sequence of a dataset in addition to the actual data.
“Defendants could have paid Gracenote to license its valuable Gracenote Data. Or they could have sought to train and ground their models only on information in the public domain. They did neither. Defendants instead improperly copied and used Gracenote Data to create their own commercially valuable AI products, all without paying a dime,” the complaint states. Full complaint PDF
Licensing Attempts
Gracenote claims that its previous attempts to work with OpenAI for a licensing agreement were rebuffed or ignored.
Recent Partnerships
Gracenote has recently inked deals to back AI ventures from other companies, including: