OpenAI and Microsoft Face Expanded Copyright Lawsuit as 400 Newspapers Join Legal Battle

The New York Times Amends Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft

In a new court filing, The Times accused Microsoft of encouraging OpenAI to train its A.I. systems using copyrighted articles. The New York Times amended its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on Thursday, modifying one claim against Microsoft and dropping another against OpenAI, according to a legal filing in federal court. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, accusing the tech companies of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train A.I. technologies including the chatbot ChatGPT. A.I. technologies now compete with The Times as a source of information, the news outlet argued in its suit. The Times claimed in its suit that OpenAI and Microsoft infringed on its copyrights. The media company also accused Microsoft of "contributory" infringement, in part because it provided the computing power that OpenAI used to build its A.I. technologies. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, The Times accused Microsoft of encouraging OpenAI to train its A.I. systems using copyrighted articles from The Times and of providing services designed to help with this training. The Times also dropped a claim from its original lawsuit, filed in 2023, accusing OpenAI of "secondarily" infringing on its copyrights because it did not prevent consumers and businesses from generating copyrighted material using A.I. "As we have long alleged, Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal our copyrighted works. Beyond amending that claim and streamlining the case to its most potent arguments, our core claims remain the same from the day we filed this lawsuit," Graham James, a Times spokesman, said in a statement. OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment. OpenAI and Microsoft have previously denied wrongdoing, saying they respect the rights of content creators. OpenAI has also argued in a court filing that ChatGPT is not a substitute for a Times subscription. The Times was the first major American media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright suits against OpenAI and other companies that build A.I. technologies. There are now more than 40 cases around the country. In a settlement last September, Anthropic, one of OpenAI's primary rivals, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors and publishers after a judge ruled it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books. In December, The Times filed another lawsuit claiming that its copyrights were repeatedly violated by Perplexity, an A.I. start-up that has built an internet search engine. Like other A.I. companies, OpenAI built its technologies by feeding them enormous amounts of digital data, some of which is copyrighted. A.I. companies have long claimed that they can legally use copyrighted material to train their systems without paying for it because they transformed the material for a different use. In accusing OpenAI of infringing on its copyrights on Thursday, The Times cited several examples of an OpenAI chatbot providing users with near-verbatim excerpts from its articles that would otherwise require a paid subscription.

400 Newspapers Sue Microsoft and OpenAI, Alleging Content Theft for AI | PYMNTS.com

The lawsuit alleges that the companies stole the newspapers' copyrighted news articles, used that content to build and train commercial AI products, including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, and reproduced or repurposed the content without permission or compensation, Platkin LLP, the law firm that filed the suit, said in a Wednesday (June 24) post on LinkedIn. Platkin LLP was founded this year by former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin and a team of litigators from the attorney general's office, according to the firm's LinkedIn profile. Matthew Platkin said in the post that the lawsuit "seeks to ensure these local publications creating original content will have meaningful protections in the AI era." "AI systems do not critically evaluate city council and community meetings," Platkin said. "They don't investigate local crimes and corruption, publish obituaries, or cover the new restaurant opening downtown. Local reporters do. This lawsuit is not about stopping AI innovation, but ensuring that innovation happens fairly and within the bounds of the law." Neither Microsoft nor OpenAI immediately replied to PYMNTS' request for comment. The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI in December 2023, alleging copyright infringement. The newspaper claimed the tech companies used its content without permission to develop their AI products. Reached by PYMNTS at the time, an OpenAI spokesperson said the firm respects the right of content creators and owners and is "committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models." In December, a federal judge directed OpenAI to provide millions of anonymized ChatGPT logs in a copyright case brought by The New York Times and other media organizations. The publishers contended that the logs were necessary to determine whether the AI system reproduced protected articles. OpenAI and Microsoft also face a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a group of authors who accuse the companies of misusing the authors' books to train AI software, while OpenAI faces a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster, who allege the company scraped their articles to train its AI.