Gracenote Media Services, LLC v. OpenAI Foundation

On 10 March 2026, Gracenote Media Services, LLC, a Delaware-based provider of media content metadata, filed suit against OpenAI and its affiliated entities. Gracenote decsribes how for over fifty years it has employed hundreds of editors to build and maintain the Gracenote Programs Database, a proprietary relational database containing millions of original program descriptions, video descriptors, and unique alphanumeric identifiers (TMSIDs) covering television, film, and other media content. The database is licensed to distributors, streaming platforms, and AI developers under agreements that impose strict restrictions on downstream use. Gracenote holds registered copyrights in the database with the United States Copyright Office.

The Complaint alleges that the Defendants copied Gracenote Data without authorisation during the training of successive GPT models from GPT-3 through GPT-5, including by scraping Gracenote's web domains via the Common Crawl dataset in breach of Gracenote's Terms of Use. The Complaint advances forensic evidence of copying: GPT-4 model variants correctly reproduced exact TMSIDs for multiple television programmes, including Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, with the probability of randomly generating a correct 12-character TMSID estimated at one in one trillion. It is further alleged that multiple GPT models reproduced verbatim, or near-verbatim, program descriptions and proprietary mood descriptor sets for dozens of titles.

The Complaint contends that the Defendants' conduct has harmed Gracenote in two markets: the market for licensed media metadata used in content discovery, and the growing market for curated data licensed for AI training and grounding. Four causes of action are asserted: direct copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. section 501; vicarious copyright infringement against the controlling entities; contributory copyright infringement; and unjust enrichment under common law.

The Plaintiff seeks statutory and compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement of profits, a permanent injunction, destruction of infringing models and training sets under 17 U.S.C. section 503(b), and an award of costs and attorneys' fees.