The New York Times sued Microsoft, OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement

The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation and multiple entities associated with OpenAI, alleging that they used their intellectual property as training data without authorization, resulting in copyright infringement and unfair competition.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Federal Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that Microsoft and OpenAI used copyrighted material from The New York Times to train their AI models, including the development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools such as Bing Chat and ChatGPT that were trained using millions of Times articles and other works. The lawsuit alleges that the AI tools are capable of generating content that “retells the content of the memorization times verbatim, carefully summarizes the content, and mimics its style of expression.”

Emphasizing democratic rights

In the lawsuit, the New York Times stressed that independent journalism is “vital to our democracy” and claimed that the service it can provide by investing in providing “in-depth, professional independent journalism” is an “increasingly rare and valuable” service that has been achieved through “the efforts of a large and expensive organization.”

The lawsuit alleges multiple allegations against the defendants, including copyright infringement, incidental and facilitated copyright infringement, and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The New York Times alleges that the defendants’ actions constituted “the construction of alternative products with the help of The Times’ significant investment in news coverage without permission or payment.”

In the lawsuit, the New York Times seeks statutory damages, compensatory damages, restitution, permanent injunctions to stop further infringement, and the destruction of all AI models and training sets containing its work.

The development of this case could be an important moment in determining the relationship between generative AI and copyright law. Cecilia Ziniti, an intellectual property and AI lawyer, said on X social media that it was a “historic” case and probably “the best case to date that claims generative AI constitutes copyright infringement”.

In its analysis, Ziniti highlights the key issue of “acquisition and substantial similarity” in the case, noting that ChatGPT’s output is closely similar to that of the New York Times and forms a major part of its training set’s Common Crawl dataset. She also highlighted J evidence in the lawsuit, using color coding to show the substantial overlap between the two.

In her analysis, Ziniti also noted that while OpenAI has content agreements with other media outlets, such as Politico, it has not signed agreements with the New York Times. She believes that this apparent oversight could be legally challenging, as it could indicate that OpenAI has deliberately ignored certain IP rights.