DENIAL v. OpenAI, Inc.

Authors Catherine Denial, Ian McDowell, and Steven Schwartz have filed a class action lawsuit in the Northern District of California Court against OpenAI and Microsoft. The plaintiffs allege that their copyrighted works were unlawfully copied, distributed, and used to train OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT, without authorisation, attribution, or compensation.

The plaintiffs are professional writers whose works include: A Proper Light Before the Country (Denial) Wilmington Massacre Was Confederacy’s Revenge (McDowell) A Comprehensive System for Item Analysis in Psychological Scale Construction (Schwartz)

They contend that OpenAI and Microsoft engaged in systematic scraping, crawling, and torrenting of copyrighted materials from so-called “shadow libraries” such as LibGen and similar sources to amass vast training datasets.

The complaint asserts twelve causes of action, including direct and vicarious copyright infringement, unfair competition, DMCA violations, conversion, CFAA and CDAFA breaches, and a Sherman Act conspiracy to restrain trade.

On 24 June 2025, the case was transferred to the Southern District of New York under a Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) order, joining In re OpenAI Copyright Infringement (MDL). The Denial action is stayed pending resolution of the MDL proceedings.

This summary is provided for educational and research purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Allegations described are those made in the filings. Please consult the underlying source documents.