Court Gives Thumbs Up to NY Times' Copyright Lawsuit Against OpenAI

The recent legal battle between The New York Times and OpenAI has taken another twist, with a court ruling against OpenAI, allowing The New York Times's 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. 

The order came 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.

An Initial Victory 

This ruling is a victory for The New York Times and other news houses like the New York Daily News and the Investigative Reporting Program, which 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 tech leader Microsoft profited by pilfering original content from newspapers nationwide.

The lawyers for The New York Times argue that the newspaper's articles were among the largest sources of copyrighted text used to build ChatGPT, further alleging that OpenAI violated copyright law in its extraction of the newspaper's news content. OpenAI has debunked the claims, responding through its spokesperson Jason Deutrom 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 Future of News 

This decision means the case will proceed to trial, though a trial date hasn't been set. Evidence will be collated and will include confidential depositions from executives on both sides and 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.

More AI tools and powerful chatbots capable of quickly summarizing news articles could lead to reduced reader visits to news websites, impacting advertising revenue. However, this particular case 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.

What the Law Says 

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 doesn't see it the same way, arguing that 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 the argument, stating 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.