Today, February 13, a collection of news and magazine publishers, including 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 News/Media Alliance, the leading industry trade association, filed a copyright and trademark infringement case in the Southern District of New York against Cohere Inc., as reported in the Wall Street Journal.
Click here to download the full complaint.
This suit alleges that Cohere, an AI company valued at over $5 billion, engaged in widespread unauthorized use of publisher content in developing and running its generative AI systems. Cohere’s behavior amounts to massive, systematic copyright infringement, as well as trademark infringement. The complaint provides a non-exhaustive list of thousands of articles that Cohere has infringed, through training, real-time use of content, and infringing outputs. Plaintiffs seek a permanent injunction and damages for Cohere’s extensive and willful infringement.
“We are going to court to protect our rights. As generative AI becomes more prevalent, it is imperative that legal protections be enforced so that innovation can flourish responsibly. This not only protects investments in the creative process and developing intellectual property, but supports the quality of what users consume and the sustainability of the AI products themselves,” Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance stated. “As news, magazine, and media publishers, we serve an important role in keeping society informed and supporting the free flow of information and ideas, but we cannot continue to do so if AI companies like Cohere are able to undercut our businesses while using our own content to compete with us.”
Tony Hunter, Chair of the Board of the News/Media Alliance, added, “For far too long, technology platforms have exploited our industry’s content without permission or compensation. Today marks a historic moment as our members unite to take a stand against the unlawful use of our intellectual property. This is a crucial step in protecting the value of our journalism.”
“The New Yorker, Vogue, GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair and our many other iconic brands cannot live up to their exceptional standards if we allow their content to be stolen, distorted and trafficked. We will defend our rights fiercely and wherever they are infringed,” said Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast.
“Copyright protections form the backbone of our news media ecosystem and the creative businesses we turn to for trustworthy information and entertainment; they cannot be disregarded without consequence. This is a case about the blatant theft of our original work to create a competing commercial product. While we welcome responsible technological innovation, with this litigation we’re putting AI companies on notice that they are not above the law and we will enforce our intellectual property rights,” stated Pam Wasserstein, President and Vice Chair of Vox Media.
Anna Bateson, CEO of Guardian Media Group, said, “As part of a considered approach to generative AI, the Guardian has explored and signed agreements with numerous partners to ensure fair compensation and attribution for the Guardian’s award-winning investigative journalism. Unfortunately, Cohere has demonstrated an egregious pattern of scraping and copying news articles to produce full verbatim copies of original content without compensation–or even worse, complete hallucinations. The Guardian is proud to stand with some of the world’s top publishers in an attempt to stop Cohere’s brazen theft and distortion of original journalism.”
More about the case:
- Cohere has used unlicensed copies of Publishers’ news and magazine articles in training and through real time-copying to directly compete with publishers. Cohere claims its chatbot’s “key differentiator” is the ability to provide “verified answers,” which Cohere’s own product reveals includes real-time content extracted from publishers.
- Cohere copies publisher content at times from behind paywalls, and where the publisher has explicitly blocked Cohere’s bot from scraping.
- Cohere’s products spit out verbatim regurgitations and substitutional summaries of news content, even when the prompt does not mention a specific article or publication. The complaint provides an illustrative list of 4,000 specific examples of this occurring.
- Cohere shows its freeriding with a feature called “Under the Hood,” which reveals Cohere making full copies, without authorization, of the articles that power its outputs.
- When not copying publisher content, Cohere engages in damaging hallucinations. Cohere often delivers fake pieces under the Publishers’ names, confusing the public and damaging Publishers’ valuable brands by falsely associating Publishers with content that lacks the quality that readers expect from Publishers.
Plaintiffs are represented by Scott Zebrak, Jenny Pariser, and Meredith Stewart of Oppenheim and Zebrak, LLP, facilitated by Regan Smith of News/Media Alliance.
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The News/Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,200 news, magazine and digital media organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print and digital publishers of original journalism. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the association focuses on ensuring the future of journalism through communication, research, advocacy, and innovation. Information about the News/Media Alliance can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.
Members of the News/Media Alliance staff have contributed to this post.