In a recent legal battle, a court ruled against OpenAI, allowing The New York Times' copyright lawsuit to proceed. The core of the case centers on The New York Times' allegation that OpenAI used its content without permission or payment.
In an order from Judge Sidney Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, while narrowing the scope of the lawsuit, the judge allowed the main copyright infringement claims to move forward. The judge promised a detailed opinion soon.
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, licensed through Midjourney.
This ruling is a victory for The New York Times, which, along with other publishers like the New York Daily News and the Investigative Reporting Program, challenged OpenAI for allegedly scraping massive amounts of data from the internet without authorization to train its popular AI service, ChatGPT. Steven Lieberman, the lawyer representing these publishers, expressed satisfaction, stating that they have the opportunity to show a jury how OpenAI and Microsoft profited by pilfering original content from newspapers nationwide.
The New York Times' lawyers argue that the newspaper's articles were among the largest sources of copyrighted text used to build ChatGPT, alleging OpenAI violated copyright law in its extraction of the newspaper's news content. OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom responded that the company welcomes the court's narrowing of the case and looks forward to demonstrating that their AI model was built on publicly available data and falls under the legal framework of "fair use."
The court's decision means the case will proceed to trial, though a trial date hasn't been set. Evidence gathering, including confidential depositions from executives on both sides, is expected to unfold in public preliminary hearings to resolve disputes over evidence and other matters. The outcome will significantly impact the news industry and the future of AI tools.
For publishers, powerful chatbots capable of quickly summarizing news articles could lead to reduced reader visits to news websites, impacting advertising revenue. While this case only targets OpenAI and its investor Microsoft, other AI companies engage in similar practices of scraping online content to train their models. The legal questions surrounding copyright law remain unclear.
Legal experts generally agree that fair use requires the generation of some sort of "transformative" new content, or commentary and criticism of the original work. The New York Times argues this doesn't apply to OpenAI's reproduction of its original reporting. Another point of analysis involves "market substitution"—whether chatbot answers replace the need to read The New York Times website. The publishers' lawyers pointed out in a January hearing that when asked about The New York Times reporting, ChatGPT often regurgitated articles verbatim. OpenAI's legal team countered that the publishers engineered prompts to elicit large amounts of content from the newspaper's website, not representative of how most users interact with the service.
Key Points:
📄 The court's decision allows The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI to proceed, marking a significant step in the legal process.
📰 The New York Times accuses OpenAI of unauthorized use of its content, while OpenAI claims its actions constitute fair use.
🤖 This case will impact the future of the news industry and AI tools, and the legal questions involved remain unresolved.