The battle between traditional publishers and AI companies has just gained its most symbolic plaintiff yet. Encyclopedia Britannica, the owner of Merriam-Webster — the dictionary that has defined the English language for nearly two centuries — has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI. When the very institution that defines words accuses you of stealing them, it sends a powerful message.
What the Lawsuit Alleges
Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the AI giant has committed massive copyright infringement.
The complaint makes several distinct claims. First, Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster, retains the copyright to nearly 100,000 online articles, which have been scraped and used to train OpenAI's LLMs without permission. This is the foundational accusation — that OpenAI helped itself to a vast library of carefully curated, professionally written content without paying for it or asking for consent.
Second, Britannica accuses OpenAI of violating copyright laws when it generates outputs that contain full or partial verbatim reproductions of its content and when the AI lab uses its articles in ChatGPT's retrieval augmented generation workflow. RAG is the process through which ChatGPT scans the web or databases for updated information when responding to user queries — essentially pulling live content into its answers.
Third, and perhaps most creatively, Britannica alleges that OpenAI violates the Lanham Act, a trademark statute, when it generates made-up hallucinations and attributes them falsely to the publisher. In other words, when ChatGPT invents information and presents it as if it came from Britannica, the publisher argues that its reputation and brand are being damaged.
The Revenue Problem
Beyond the legal technicalities, the lawsuit highlights a very real business problem facing publishers in the AI era. The lawsuit states that ChatGPT starves web publishers like Britannica of revenue by generating responses to users' queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers.
This is the core economic argument. When a user asks ChatGPT a question and receives an answer drawn from Britannica's content, that user has no reason to visit Britannica's website. No visit means no ad revenue, no subscription conversion, and no brand engagement. The publisher does all the work of researching, writing, and fact-checking, while the AI company reaps the benefits by serving that knowledge directly to its own users.
Britannica also alleges that ChatGPT's hallucinations jeopardize the public's continued access to high-quality and trustworthy online information. If AI-generated misinformation erodes trust in established reference sources, the long-term damage to public knowledge could be significant.
A Growing Wave of Lawsuits
Britannica is far from alone in taking legal action against OpenAI. The New York Times, Ziff Davis (owner of Mashable, CNET, IGN, PC Mag, and others), and more than a dozen newspapers across the U.S. and Canada, including the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, the Toronto Star, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, have all sued OpenAI.
A similar Britannica lawsuit against Perplexity is also still pending. The pattern is clear: publishers across every category — news, technology, reference, and education — are pushing back against AI companies that have built billion-dollar products on the back of their content.
The Legal Landscape: Still Murky
One of the most important aspects of this case is that the law has not yet clearly settled whether using copyrighted content to train AI models constitutes infringement. There is not a strong legal precedent that establishes whether using copyrighted content to train an LLM is copyright infringement.
However, there has been one notable ruling. In one particular instance, Anthropic successfully convinced a federal judge that using content as training data is transformative enough to be legal. However, the judge argued that Anthropic violated the law by illegally downloading millions of books rather than paying for them, which warranted a $1.5 billion class action settlement for impacted writers.
This creates an interesting gray area. The act of training on the content may be legal, but how that content was obtained — and how it is reproduced in outputs — could still be grounds for liability.
What This Means for the AI Industry
The Britannica lawsuit is more than just another legal filing. It represents a philosophical clash between old knowledge institutions and new technology platforms. Britannica has spent over 250 years building a reputation for accuracy and authority. OpenAI has spent a decade building systems that can generate answers to nearly any question in seconds.
The question at the heart of this case — and dozens like it — is whether AI companies owe something to the creators whose work made their products possible. The courts will ultimately decide, but regardless of the legal outcome, the pressure on AI companies to establish licensing agreements with publishers will only continue to grow.
OpenAI did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment before publication.
