Gracenote, the metadata business owned by Nielsen that compiles identifiers and descriptive information for films, television programs and other media, filed suit against OpenAI on Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan, alleging its copyrighted material was used without authorization to train artificial intelligence.
The complaint asserts that proprietary Gracenote content - including program identifiers and descriptive write-ups - was incorporated into the training of ChatGPT and that the AI model can be prompted to reproduce Gracenote’s descriptions and identifiers. The lawsuit cites examples in which ChatGPT produced copies of Gracenote’s metadata for well-known television shows, including "Breaking Bad," "Game of Thrones," "The Office" and "Saturday Night Live." Gracenote says those examples indicate OpenAI relied on its material during model training.
Gracenote requested an unspecified amount in monetary damages and asked the court to issue an order preventing OpenAI from using its data going forward. The complaint notes that Gracenote historically licenses its metadata to media distributors and also provides licensing to other AI providers for training purposes. The company alleges that OpenAI’s unlicensed use threatens to undercut both of those markets.
In describing the company’s work, the complaint highlights Gracenote’s editorial effort and staff. It says Gracenote employs more than 1,000 editors who "painstakingly source, ingest, aggregate, research, edit, write, curate, and link content" to build its database of shows and movies.
Gracenote’s chief executive Jared Grusd said in a statement that OpenAI "chose to use decades of our proprietary work without permission to build and sell its models." The company framed the lawsuit as a response to the commercial use of that work without a licensing arrangement.
An OpenAI spokesperson responded by saying the company’s AI models "empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use." The statement represents OpenAI’s public defense of its training practices, as cited in the complaint.
The complaint also emphasizes Gracenote’s commercial model of licensing metadata to downstream distributors and to AI providers for training, and it argues that OpenAI’s conduct risks disrupting those established licensing markets. Beyond the requested damages and injunction, the filing seeks judicial relief aimed at preventing what Gracenote describes as further unauthorized use of its copyrighted material.
Contextual note: The lawsuit centers on whether Gracenote’s copyrighted metadata was used without consent to train a commercial AI product and on the potential market effects of that use.