OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that instead of removing copyrighted material from ChatGPT’s training, the company is offering to cover customers’ legal fees for copyright infringement lawsuits.
During the company’s first developer conference on Monday, Altman said “We can defend our customers and pay the costs incurred if you face legal claims around copyright infringement. And this applies both to ChatGPT Enterprise and the API.”
OpenAI is calling the compensation offer Copyright Shield and it will only include paid users of the business tier, ChatGPT Enterprise, and developers using ChatGPT’s programming interface.
Users of the free version of ChatGPT are not included in this offering.
In September, a number of prominent fiction authors including John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Elin Hilderbrand, and more joined the Authors Guild in filing a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement, particularly in the training of the chatbot.
During the conference, which was intended to attract programmers working with ChatGPT, Altman debuted a ChatGPT app store, which will officially launch later this month. The app store will allow developers to advertise and monetize their custom bots built with OpenAI technology.
