OverDrive Seeks Preliminary Injunction Blocking Open AI's Sora Trademark Infringement
OverDrive lawyers argue that the "toxic waste content" being generated by Open AI's Sora video generation app is causing immediate harm to OverDrive, which owns Sora, the popular student-focused digital borrowing platform, and must be halted.
Two weeks after filing a trademark infringement suit in federal court over Open AI's use the name Sora for its video-generation app, leading library vendor OverDrive, which owns Sora, the popular student-focused digital borrowing platform, is now asking the court for a preliminary injunction blocking the AI giant from continuing to use the name while the litigation plays out.
"OpenAI’s conduct not only infringes OverDrive’s intellectual property rights, but also poses a serious risk of confusion, deception, and harm to vulnerable audiences," reads OverDrive's December 5 motion for a preliminary injunction, which includes more than 700 pages of supporting evidence.
"This misuse of the OverDrive SORA trademark threatens to harm (and already has harmed) the goodwill associated with OverDrive’s SORA and SORA Icon trademarks," the motion continues. "This harm stems from not just from the two identically named apps, but from the billions of fake videos, each stamped with Sora and the Sora Icon, a significant percentage of which contain racist, antisemitic, violent, sexual, and otherwise harmful content. As such, the harm from the identically named apps is multiplied exponentially by the toxic waste content that the Sora app creates and emblazons with the Sora and Sora Icon marks."
The move significantly ramps up the legal battle, which began on November 19, when OverDrive first filed suit against Open AI, alleging that the AI company's unauthorized use of OverDrive's trademarks presented "a certain, grave risk of reputational harm to OverDrive if the public perceives an association between OverDrive and OpenAI."
In its suit, OverDrive is seeking a court order barring Open AI's further infringement of the Sora trademark as well as damages. The suit also asks the court to disgorge OpenAI profits from the use of Sora and pay OverDrive "three times the amount of actual damages or profits," along with attorney fees and court costs.
