Good morning, and welcome to Tech News Now, TheStreet’s daily technology roundup.
In today’s broadcast, we’ll look at the several lawsuits filed against OpenAI and Google, Salesforce earnings, and European privacy issues against Meta.
Today’s tickers include: (AAPL), (META), and (GOOG).
Automattic, the firm behind Tumblr and WordPress.com, is apparently going to sign a content license agreement with OpenAI and Midjourney under which it will sell user data.
Let’s get to it.
READ MORE: In Vegas, Hackers Battle ChatGPT With Assistance From The White House
Big Tech and All the Lawsuits
The number of litigation in the Big Tech sector continues to rise.
On Wednesday, OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, was served with six fresh complaints alleging additional copyright infringement.
Both copyright lawsuits filed against OpenAI by news organizations The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet allege that the company violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, which prohibits the removal of author and title information from protected works in order to reasonably conceal copyright infringement.
Both lawsuits, filed by the same law firm, use Copyleaks statistics indicating that roughly 60% of ChatGPT comments contain plagiarized content.
However, they go on to say that OpenAI chose to remove the copyright management information present in the articles it trained ChatGPT on, training the model “not to acknowledge or respect copyright, not to notify ChatGPT users when the responses they received were protected by journalists’ copyrights, and not to provide attribution when using the works of human journalists.”
READ MORE: Apple’s Stock Rises On News That The Company Is Working On Its Own ChatGPT Replacement
“Defendants had reason to know that ChatGPT would be less popular and would generate less revenue if users believed that ChatGPT responses violated third-party copyrights,” according to the complaint filed by The Intercept.
OpenAI has dealt with numerous copyright claims in the past. Perhaps the most notable is the one filed by the New York Times at the end of 2023, which alleges enormous copyright infringement in both the input and output of OpenAI’s products.
These new lawsuits, on the other hand, take a slightly different approach, claiming that OpenAI’s removal of title and author information from articles used to train ChatGPT violated the DMCA, which is not addressed in the Times’ complaint.
Read The Intercept’s complaint here. Read the Raw Story and AlterNet’s lawsuit here.
To ensure that it did not feel left out of Wednesday’s legal frenzy, a group of 32 media companies, including Axel Springer, the parent of Business Insider, filed a $2.3 billion lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company’s abuse of its dominant search and advertising position has resulted in losses for the companies.
READ MORE: The FTC Is Looking Into ChatGPT Producer OpenAI For Potential Consumer Harm
“The media companies involved have incurred losses due to a less competitive market, which is a direct result of Google’s misconduct,” a statement made by lawyers Geradin Partners and Stek said.
“If Google hadn’t abused its dominating position, media companies would have received considerably more advertising income and paid lower rates for ad tech services. Crucially, these money could have been reinvested to improve the European media scene,” the lawyers stated.
A Google spokeswoman told Reuters that the business is against the action, calling it “speculative and opportunistic.”
Today, a US judge will decide whether to dismiss X’s lawsuit against the NGO The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has been monitoring hate speech on the platform since Musk’s acquisition.
Musk accused the organization of seeking to “scare” away advertising.
READ MORE: Elon Musk Has Launched A New AI Start-Up To Compete With ChatGPT
Salesforce (CRM) saw a 1% increase in pre-market trade after reporting an earnings beat despite a lower revenue outlook.
Salesforce announced earnings of $2.29 per share — above forecasts of $2.26 — and revenue of $9.29 billion — beyond projections of $9.22 billion — for the quarter ended Jan. 31.
Salesforce issued full-year projections, saying it expects $38 billion in revenue for the fiscal year 2025, which is lower than analyst expectations of $38.62 billion.
CEO Marc Benioff described the previous year as a “phenomenal year of transformation” for the company.
The story came on the same day that NPR released an extensive investigation into Benioff’s private purchasing of land in Hawaii, for reasons no one understands.
The corporation declared a quarterly dividend of forty cents per share.
Meta raises greater privacy worries.
The European Consumer Organization filed complaints against Meta on Wednesday, alleging that the tech giant is not following the fair data processing norm outlined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The accusations also allege that Meta lacks a “valid legal basis” to justify its “massive collection of data” from Facebook and Instagram users.
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