Source: JDSupra

JDSupra reports on two significant rulings from the Southern District of New York that allow copyright claims against generative AI companies to proceed. In Baldacci v. OpenAI, the court denied a motion to dismiss, ruling that AI-generated summaries and sequels could potentially infringe on copyrighted books by capturing protected narrative structures. The court emphasized that "substantial similarity" is a fact-intensive inquiry that cannot be resolved at the pleading stage.

Similarly, in Advance Local Media v. Cohere, the court held that AI systems producing close paraphrases or "substitutive summaries" of news articles might violate copyright laws. The judges declined to use rigid quantitative text-copying thresholds, focusing instead on whether the AI captured the "heart" of the original work. These decisions signal that U.S. courts are unwilling to "short-circuit" these disputes, requiring a full factual record to understand how AI models replicate protected expression.