NYT, OpenAI argue landmark copyright case before judge — SkimNews
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- The New York Times, OpenAI, and Microsoft filed summary judgment motions Friday in the 2023 copyright suit, with District Judge Sidney Stein expected to rule in the coming months on whether the case proceeds to trial next year
- The Times argued OpenAI and Microsoft copied its works at scale to build commercial substitutes that violate copyright law
- OpenAI countered that existing copyright law permits scraping publicly available works to train LLMs, citing two California federal court fair-use wins — Kadrey v. Meta and Bartz v. Anthropic
- The Times distinguished those rulings, arguing those plaintiffs failed to show AI outputs competed with their products, and urged the New York federal court to apply Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedents instead
- The Justice Department filed a brief Thursday supporting OpenAI, arguing that training LLMs from millions of digital works delivers transformative public benefit that offsets competitive harm to publishers
- A ruling for the Times could upend AI industry business models, while a ruling for OpenAI and Microsoft could strip publishers of leverage over how their content is scraped and monetized
Why it matters: The Justice Department's Thursday brief backing OpenAI pulls federal AI policy into what was a private publisher dispute, meaning a Times win would leave the government on the wrong side of a precedent it just endorsed. A ruling for OpenAI and Microsoft would lock in fair-use defenses across the AI industry and strip publishers of their strongest legal lever against content scraping.
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