{"id":528177,"date":"2026-03-17T05:09:19","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T05:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/528177\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T05:09:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T05:09:19","slug":"the-dictionary-sues-openai-techcrunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/528177\/","title":{"rendered":"The dictionary sues OpenAI | TechCrunch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging in its complaint<\/a> that the AI giant has committed \u201cmassive copyright infringement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster, retains the copyright to nearly 100,000 online articles, which have been scraped and used to train OpenAI\u2019s LLMs without permission, the publisher alleges in the lawsuit.<\/p>\n

Britannica also accuses OpenAI of violating copyright laws when it generates outputs that contain \u201cfull or partial verbatim reproductions\u201d of its content and when the AI lab uses its articles in ChatGPT\u2019s RAG (retrieval augmented generation<\/a>) workflow. OpenAI\u2019s RAG tool is how the LLM scans the web or other databases for newly updated information when responding to a query. Britannica also alleges that OpenAI violates the Lanham Act, a trademark statute, when it generates made-up hallucinations and attributes them falsely to the publisher.<\/p>\n

\u201cChatGPT starves web publishers like [Britannica] of revenue by generating responses to users\u2019 queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers like [Britannica],\u201d the lawsuit reads. Britannica also alleges ChatGPT\u2019s hallucinations jeopardize \u201cthe public\u2019s continued access to high-quality and trustworthy online information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Britannica joins a number of other publishers and writers in pursuing legal action against OpenAI over copyright issues. The New York Times<\/a>, Ziff Davis<\/a> (owner of Mashable, CNET, IGN, PC Mag, and others), and more than a dozen newspapers<\/a> across the U.S. and Canada<\/a>, including the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, the Sun Sentinel, the Toronto Star, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, have sued OpenAI.<\/p>\n

A similar Britannica lawsuit<\/a> against Perplexity is still pending.<\/p>\n

There is not a strong legal precedent that establishes whether using copyrighted content to train an LLM is copyright infringement. But in one particular instance<\/a>, Anthropic successfully convinced federal judge William Alsup that this use case \u2014 using the content as training data \u2014 is transformative enough to be legal. However, Alsup argued that Anthropic violated the law by illegally downloading millions of books, rather than paying for them, which warranted a $1.5 billion class action settlement for impacted writers.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

OpenAI did not respond to TechCrunch\u2019s request for comment before publication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging in its complaint that the AI giant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":528178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,237516,2932,60531,1283,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-528177","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-encyclopedia-britannica","12":"tag-lawsuit","13":"tag-merriam-webster","14":"tag-openai","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/528178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}