Authors Seek Summary Judgment Against OpenAI Over Alleged Piracy

Authors suing OpenAI and Microsoft have asked a New York federal judge for an immediate ruling on copyright infringement, asserting that the technology company built its flagship generative models on mass piracy without legal justification.

The motion for summary judgment, filed this week before U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein, urges the court to determine liability across 194 protected titles prior to trial. The consolidated proceeding merges several high-profile copyright actions, including the Authors Guild class action, a nonfiction writers suit against Microsoft, and a lawsuit originally launched in California by authors Paul Tremblay and Sarah Silverman.

According to court documents reported by TorrentFreak, the plaintiffs argue that OpenAI bypassed legitimate commercial channels and instead sourced reading material from illicit digital repositories. The filing alleges that OpenAI began training by downloading torrented files from Library Genesis, widely known as LibGen.

## High Stakes for Fair Use Defense

In the brief quoted by TorrentFreak, the authors state that "OpenAI's GPT models pose an existential threat to those who write and publish books," warning that "AI-generated books of all types are already flooding the market." Rather than seeking immediate financial damages, the current motion asks the judge to invalidate OpenAI's anticipated fair use defense at the liability stage.

The filing contends that downloading unauthorized book archives directly harms the literary marketplace by replacing human output with machine-generated works. While earlier copyright lawsuits against technology firms yielded mixed results in California, the New York litigation presents a direct challenge to the training pipelines behind commercial generative systems.

For the entertainment and publishing sectors, the outcome in Judge Stein's courtroom carries substantial industry implications. If the court rejects fair use defenses regarding scraped or pirated databases, artificial intelligence developers could face strict licensing mandates and costly operational overhauls to secure training rights from rights holders.