OpenAI scored a major legal victory yesterday as Judge McMahon dismissed Raw Story Media’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) claims, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing—”No concrete harm, no standing.”
Raw Story Media, Inc. and AlterNet Media, Inc., prominent players in the news industry with over 400,000 published articles, accused OpenAI of violating the DMCA, specifically Section 1202(b)(i). The plaintiffs claimed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT had ingested thousands of their copyrighted articles—without permission and stripped of author names, titles, and copyright notices—during its model training process.
In a decisive ruling, Judge McMahon of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York granted OpenAI’s motion to dismiss, stating that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate any concrete harm. The court echoed the Supreme Court’s reasoning in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez: “No concrete harm, no standing.”
The court further emphasized that the removal of Copyright Management Information (CMI), without evidence of dissemination or actual damage, was “too abstract” to be considered a concrete injury. As the ruling explained, “Plaintiffs have not alleged any actual adverse effects stemming from this alleged DMCA violation.”
The court also addressed the plaintiffs’ request for injunctive relief, which sought to compel OpenAI to remove their content from its systems due to a “substantial risk” that ChatGPT might generate verbatim responses reproducing their articles without credit. Judge McMahon found this argument speculative:
“Plaintiffs have not plausibly alleged that there is a ‘substantial risk’ that the current version of ChatGPT will generate a response plagiarizing one of Plaintiffs’ articles.”
The court continued:
“An allegation of future injury may suffice if the threatened injury is ‘certainly impending,’ but that threshold has not been met here.”
Judge McMahon also made it clear what the plaintiffs were truly after:
“Let us be clear about what is really at stake here. The alleged injury for which Plaintiffs truly seek redress is not the exclusion of CMI from Defendants’ training sets, but rather Defendants’ use of Plaintiffs’ articles to develop ChatGPT without compensation to Plaintiffs.”
In essence, the plaintiffs’ real issue was the unauthorized use of their articles without payment, which is not addressed by Section 1202(b)(i) of the DMCA. This distinction led the court to dismiss the claims.
While the dismissal was without prejudice, allowing the plaintiffs a limited chance to amend their complaint, Judge McMahon expressed doubt:
“I cannot ascertain whether amendment would be futile without seeing a proposed amended pleading. I am skeptical about Plaintiffs’ ability to allege a cognizable injury.”
Our DC IP lawyers recognize Judge McMahon’s ruling underscores a key point: if you’re going to challenge a tech giant like OpenAI over copyright issues, you need more than vague claims and speculative risks—you need evidence of actual harm.
As the judge summed up:
“Whether there is another statute or legal theory that does elevate this type of harm remains to be seen. But that question is not before the Court today.”