Judge Denies Cohere Motion to Dismiss in News Media Industry Lawsuit Against AI Theft

Arlington, VA - Last night, Judge Colleen McMahon denied AI company Cohere's motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought against it by a collection of news and magazine publishers alleging copyright and trademark infringement.

US District Judge McMahon, of the Southern District of New York, denied Cohere's motion in its entirety. The court's opinion found that the publishers adequately alleged that Command, Cohere's GAI model, directly infringes publishers' content by producing substitutive summary outputs. The opinion also rejected challenges to publishers' theories of secondary copyright infringement and trademark claims based on AI hallucinations. Cohere had not challenged other claims, based on copying content for AI training, crawling websites to generate real-time responses using a technique called retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and delivering outputs that are full verbatim copies or substantial excerpts.

Some key excerpts from the Court's opinion :

• "Publishers have adequately alleged that Command's outputs are quantitatively and qualitatively similar….'It is not possible to determine infringement through a simple word count; the quantitative analysis of two works must always occur in the shadow of their qualitative nature.'"
• "Cohere's contention that the only similarities to Publishers' works are Command's use of the same facts is belied by Publishers' allegations and examples showing that Command's outputs directly copy and paste entire paragraphs of Publishers' articles verbatim."
• "Publishers have plausibly pleaded that Cohere takes affirmative steps to foster infringement by advertising Command as a tool to access news in order to solicit customers."
• "Publishers have also adequately alleged that Cohere's use of Publishers' trademarks constitutes 'use in commerce' because such use is likely to divert traffic, sales, and subscriptions from Publishers."

Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, the leading industry trade association of which each plaintiff is a member, said, "We're grateful that Judge McMahon soundly rejected all aspects of Cohere's motion to dismiss. As the complaint alleges, Cohere has engaged in massive, systemic infringement, and the affected publishers deserve their day in court. This decision is the first step towards justice for these publishers, who deserve the full legal protection offered by the law for their intellectual property. Copyright and trademark protections are vitally important for the health and longevity of the news media industry, which serves an important role in keeping society informed and supporting the free flow of information and ideas."

The publishers in this case, a group 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, filed a brief in July opposing Cohere's motion to dismiss parts of the case.

This follows their complaint, which provided a non-exhaustive list of thousands of articles that Cohere has infringed, through training, real-time use of content, and infringing outputs, as well as trademark infringement, listed below along with additional information about the case.