Grammarly’s “Expert Review” feature used the names of hundreds of real writers to sell AI-generated editing advice, without obtaining consent. A class action complaint in the Southern District of New York frames the case not as a copyright dispute, but as a straightforward violation of century-old right-of-publicity laws.

Gracenote sues OpenAI for copying not just its media metadata, but the proprietary relational framework that organizes it. The complaint deploys established compilation copyright doctrine in a new context: as evidence that OpenAI's models encoded the protectable structure of a curated database, not just the data values.