Judge allows ‘New York Times’ copyright case against OpenAI to go forward
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected OpenAI’s request to toss out a copyright lawsuit from The New York Times that alleges that the tech company exploited the newspaper’s content without permission or payment.
In an order allowing the lawsuit to go forward, Judge Sidney Stein, of the Southern District of New York, narrowed the scope of the lawsuit but allowed the case’s main copyright infringement claims to go forward.
Stein did not immediately release an opinion but promised one would come “expeditiously.”
The decision is a victory for the newspaper, which has joined forces with other publishers, including The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, to challenge the way that OpenAI collected vast amounts of data from the web to train its popular artificial intelligence service, ChatGPT.
Attorney Steven Lieberman, who is on the legal team representing the news publishers, celebrated the judge’s ruling.
“We appreciate the opportunity to present a jury with the facts about how OpenAI and Microsoft are profiting wildly from stealing the original content of newspapers across the country,” Lieberman said in a statement to NPR.
Lawyers for The New York Times believe that the paper’s articles are one of the biggest sources of copyrighted text that OpenAI used to build ChatGPT into the premier AI chatbot, and they allege that OpenAI violated copyright laws in its siphoning of the newspaper’s journalism.
OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment.
OpenAI leaders have argued that the company’s mass data scraping, including articles from The Times, is protected under a legal doctrine known as “fair use.”
It allows for material to be reused without permission in certain instances, including for research, teaching and commentary.
The judge’s ruling means that the suit can now proceed to trial, but a trial date has not been set. Evidence gathering, including depositions with executives on both sides of the case, are expected to happen confidentially, along with public pretrial hearings to settle disputes over evidence and other matters.
The legal fight between one of the world’s most influential news outlets and Silicon Valley’s leading AI company puts a lot on the line for both the news industry and the future of AI tools.
For publishers, the fear is that powerful chatbots that can quickly summarize news articles when queried will mean that readers visit news websites less often, prompting a drop in advertising that could affect the industry’s bottom line.
And while the suit only names OpenAI and its financial backer, Microsoft, other AI companies also scrape the web for content to train their models. For the most part, the AI industry has followed OpenAI’s lead when it comes to training chatbot and other AI services, operating under the premise that processing data found on the open web into chatbot answers is legally protected by copyright law.
But the law remains unsettled on the matter.
Courts have said fair use of a copyrighted work must generate something new that is “transformative,” or comments on or refers back to an original work. The Times argues that this does not apply to how OpenAI reproduces the paper’s original reporting.
Another part of the legal analysis will involve an idea known as “market substitution,” referring to whether chatbot answers are a substitute for, say, reading The Times website, or if chatbots and newspapers operate in different marketplaces.
In a hearing in New York in January, lawyers for the publishers argued that when ChatGPT was asked questions about subjects covered by The Times, the chatbot regurgitated articles verbatim.
Yet OpenAI’s legal team shot back that the news outlets appeared to have specifically manipulated prompts to essentially force the chatbot to spit out large chunks lifted from the paper’s website. This is not how most people interact with the service, nor how the chatbot is designed to operate, said Joseph Gratz, a lawyer for OpenAI.
“This isn’t a document retrieval system. It is a large language mode,” Gratz said.
How Alabama Power kept bills up and opposition out to become one of the most powerful utilities in the country
In one of the poorest states in America, the local utility earns massive profits producing dirty energy with almost no pushback from state regulators.
No more Elmo? APT could cut ties with PBS
The board that oversees Alabama Public Television is considering disaffiliating from PBS, ending a 55-year relationship.
Nonprofit erases millions in medical debt across Gulf South, says it’s ‘Band-Aid’ for real issue
Undue Medical Debt has paid off more than $299 million in medical debts in Alabama. Now, the nonprofit warns that the issue could soon get worse.
Roy Wood Jr. on his father, his son and his new book
Actor, comedian and writer Roy Wood Jr. is out with a new book -- "The Man of Many Fathers: Life Lessons Disguised as a Memoir." He writes about his experience growing up in Birmingham, losing his dad as a teenager and all the lessons he learned from various father figures throughout his career.
Auburn fires coach Hugh Freeze following 12th loss in his last 15 SEC games
The 56-year-old Freeze failed to fix Auburn’s offensive issues in three years on the Plains, scoring 24 or fewer points in 17 of his 22 league games. He also ended up on the wrong end of too many close matchups, including twice this season thanks partly to questionable calls.
In a ‘disheartening’ era, the nation’s former top mining regulator speaks out
Joe Pizarchik, who led the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement from 2009 to 2017, says Alabama’s move in the wake of a fatal 2024 home explosion increases risks to residents living atop “gassy” coal mines.
