AI firm Cohere hit with copyright violation lawsuit from major news publishers

The Canadian artificial intelligence firm Cohere is facing litigation from fourteen publishers who accuse it of systematic copyright and trademark infringement stemming from the unauthorized use of their content in the development and running of its generative AI systems. 

This is the latest legal tussle in the fight between content providers like media houses and generative AI models that can access their text. These AI models can even access content behind paywalls and present them to users in digested bits, usually word for word. 

Media publishers’ allegations against Cohere 

The complaint was reportedly filed in the Southern District of New York. It accuses Cohere of infringing on thousands of the publishers’ articles and wants a permanent injunction, jury trial, and damages of up to $150k for every work affected. 

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Advance Local Media, Condé Nast, The Atlantic, Forbes Media, The Guardian, Business Insider, LA Times, McClatchy Media Company, Newsday, Plain Dealer Publishing Company, Politico, The Republican Company, Toronto Star Newspapers and Vox Media, all members of trade association News/Media Alliance.

They have tagged it a “lawsuit to protect journalism from systematic copyright and trademark infringement.” According to the documents, Cohere does not create its own content but instead capitalizes on the creative output of publishers.

It uses this output, scraped copies of published articles, without permission or compensation, to power its artificial intelligence service. The AI firm’s practices subsequently affect the amount of traffic that goes to publishers’ sites, ultimately competing with the publishers’ offering. 

The suit includes screenshots of plagiarized articles, including an example that warns that the “story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers”  but still provides the full article to users regardless of whether they have a Business Insider subscription.

Even worse, the lawsuit claims Cohere does not only steal publisher works, it also “blatantly manufactures fake pieces and attributes them to us, misleading the public and tarnishing our brands.”

Cohere has issued a response

In response to the litigation, a Cohere spokesperson has stated that the company “strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI.”

“We have long prioritized controls that mitigate the risk of IP infringement and respect the rights of holders,” the spokesperson said before adding that the company would have welcomed a chance to discuss their concerns and explain its enterprise-focused approach rather than learning about them in a filing. 

“We believe this lawsuit is misguided and frivolous, and expect this matter to be resolved in our favor,” the spokesperson further added. 

The field of generative AI is growing by leaps and bounds these days. It requires vast amounts of data to train its models, which has resulted in clashes between publishers, content providers, and AI companies. 

For example, the New York Times sued the world’s most valuable AI company, OpenAI over copyright violation. News Corp.’s Dow Jones, which owns The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, also sued Jeff Bezos-backed Perplexity AI for similar violations.

Over the past couple of years, entertainers like novelist Michael Chabon and comedian Sarah Silverman have also initiated litigation over their material being used to train large language models without permission or compensation.

Earlier this week, Thomson Reuters won the first big AI copyright case from a 2020 lawsuit against Ross Intelligence when a judge ruled against the AI firm. The judge agreed that Ross Intelligence had infringed copyright law by reproducing material from the Reuter’s legal database Westlaw.

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