Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue OpenAI for copyright infringement over scraping of nearly 100,000 articles

Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging the company scraped nearly 100,000 copyrighted online articles to train its large language models without permission, and further violates copyright law when generating outputs containing verbatim reproductions of their content or using their articles in ChatGPT's retrieval augmented generation workflow. The suit also alleges OpenAI violates trademark law when it generates hallucinated content and falsely attributes it to the publishers. The lawsuit joins a growing list of copyright cases against OpenAI from publishers including The New York Times, Ziff Davis, and dozens of newspapers across the U.S. and Canada, while a similar Britannica lawsuit against Perplexity remains pending.