According to Cointelegraph, OpenAI has announced that it will cover legal costs for business-tier ChatGPT users facing copyright infringement issues. The company's pledge, called Copyright Shield, applies only to users of its ChatGPT Enterprise and developer platform, excluding those using the free and Plus ChatGPT versions. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made the announcement during the company's first developer conference, DevDay, on November 6.
OpenAI joins tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in offering legal support to users accused of copyright infringement. Stock image providers Adobe and Shutterstock, which also have generative AI offerings, have made similar promises. During DevDay, OpenAI also announced that users will soon be able to create custom ChatGPT models and sell them on an upcoming app store. Additionally, the company unveiled a new and updated AI model called ChatGPT-4 Turbo.
OpenAI is currently facing multiple lawsuits alleging that it used copyrighted material to train its AI models. In July, comedian and author Sarah Silverman, along with two others, sued OpenAI, claiming that ChatGPT's training data includes their copyrighted work accessed from illegal online libraries. The company was hit with at least two more lawsuits in September, including a class action accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of using stolen private information to train models and a suit from the Author's Guild alleging 'systematic theft' of copyrighted material.