New York Times v. OpenAI: Judge allows main claims to proceed
OpenAI wanted the copyright lawsuit to be thrown out. However, the judge in charge refused and the main claims of the New York Times remain in place.
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The New York Times accuses OpenAI of using articles to train AI models without permission. And of having used the content of the articles in an unauthorized manner as answers in ChatGPT. OpenAI had hoped that the responsible judge would dismiss the lawsuit. But that is not the case. In an order allowing the lawsuit to proceed, Sidney Stein, Judge of the Southern District of New York, limited the scope of the lawsuit but allowed the main copyright claims to proceed.
The case may now go to trial in a court of law. A date for the first day of trial has not yet been set.
New York Times and OpenAI are looking forward to the trial
The New York Times' lawyer told National Public Radio (NPR): "We look forward to the opportunity to present to the jury the facts about how OpenAI and Microsoft are profiting from the theft of original content from newspapers across the country." Steven Liebermann is now representing the New York Times and other publishers who have joined the lawsuit.
The New York Times argues that OpenAI used the copyrighted articles to train ChatGPT and the model behind it. They speak of a skimming of newspaper journalism and that this is a copyright infringement.
OpenAI, on the other hand, invokes the US principle of fair use. According to this principle, copyright-protected content may also be used if it serves the general public or research. A lawyer for OpenAI also welcomed the judge's decision. They are looking forward to declaring the use under fair use.
The outcome of the case will also affect other AI companies and publishers. All AI providers crawl the web for freely available content and use it for training. However, because this is currently at least questionable in terms of copyright, OpenAI, for example, has already concluded contracts with numerous media companies to be allowed to use their content. In Germany, this includes the Axel Springer publishing house, as well as the titles of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
Publishers are concerned that AI chatbots and AI search engines are already aggregating content in such a way that people are no longer going to the publishers' websites, thereby cutting into their advertising revenue. This also applies to the newly introduced AI overviews in Google and Perplexity in Germany.
According to an NPR article, courts in the US have already said that "fair use of a copyrighted work must produce something new that is 'transformative' or comments on or refers back to an original work." The New York Times says OpenAI is reproducing the original articles instead. There is also the question of whether chatbots and newspapers operate in the same or different markets –, i.e. whether a chatbot's responses are a substitute for visiting the newspaper's website.
(emw)