OpenAI, Microsoft Sued by New York Times for Copyright Infringement
By Movieguide® Contributor
The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.
According to CNN Business, “the companies’ artificial intelligence technology illegally copied millions of Times articles to train ChatGPT and other services to provide people with instant access to information — technology that now competes with the Times.”
“These tools were built with and continue to use independent journalism and content that is only available because we and our peers reported, edited, and fact-checked it at high cost and with considerable expertise,” the Times said, per CNBC. “Settled copyright law protects our journalism and content. If Microsoft and OpenAI want to use our work for commercial purposes, the law requires that they first obtain our permission. They have not done so.”
OpenAI representative spokesperson Lindsey Held stated, “We respect the rights of content creators and owners and are committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models. Our ongoing conversations with the New York Times have been productive and moving forward constructively, so we are surprised and disappointed with this development. We’re hopeful that we will find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we are doing with many other publishers.”
The Verge noted, “The New York Times is one of many news outlets that have blocked OpenAI’s web crawler in recent months, preventing the AI company from continuing to scrape content from its website and using the data to train AI models. The BBC, CNN, and Reuters have moved to block OpenAI’s web crawler as well.”
“Other publications, however, are embracing AI — or, at least, the payments that come with it. Axel Springer, which owns Politico and Business Insider, struck a deal with OpenAI earlier this month that allows ChatGPT to pull information directly from both sources, while the Associated Press is allowing OpenAI to train its models on its news stories for the next two years,” The Verge added.
Movieguide® previously reported on another lawsuit filed against OpenAI:
Authors Guild members, including John Grisham, George R. R. Martin and Jodi Picoult, have filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the tech infringes on their written work.
“The Authors Guild serves to protect the literary landscape and the profession of writing,” Maya Shanbhag Lang, the president of the Authors Guild, said in a statement about the suit. “This case is merely the beginning of our battle to defend authors from theft by OpenAI and other generative AI.”
The lawsuit states that OpenAI copied authors’ works “without permission,” pointing to “accurately generated summaries” the technology created of Grisham’s books.
“The lawsuit seeks class certification, an injunction prohibiting their works from being used in the large language models without authorization, unspecified actual damages and, in the alternative, statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work,” Deadline reported.
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