Copyright cases against OpenAI consolidated into a single New York MDL

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ordered the consolidation of the outstanding US copyright suits against OpenAI — brought by The New York Times, the Daily News, the Authors Guild, and groups of journalists and book authors including Sarah Silverman and Mona Awad — into a single multidistrict litigation, MDL No. 3143, in the Southern District of New York. Judge Sidney Stein, who was already presiding over six of the underlying cases including the Times’ suit, took charge of pretrial proceedings across the consolidated docket.

The order was procedural rather than substantive — it decided nothing about whether OpenAI’s use of copyrighted text to train its models was lawful — but it was consequential for how the litigation would unfold. Centralising the cases meant a single judge would set the schedule for discovery, resolve common legal questions such as the scope of fair use, and coordinate what had been a scattered set of separate suits filed across more than a year by publishers and authors with overlapping claims against the same defendant.

The consolidation set up the ruling that followed the next day, in which Stein largely denied OpenAI and Microsoft’s motion to dismiss the Times’ claims, and gave the MDL structure through which that ruling would apply across the other consolidated suits as well.