NYT-OpenAI Copyright Case Hits Summary Judgment Phase — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- The New York Times' 2023 copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft moved into a critical new phase Friday, with all three parties presenting summary judgment arguments to a judge ahead of a possible trial.
- The Times argued OpenAI and Microsoft copied its works at scale to build commercial substitutes; OpenAI countered that copyright law allows scraping publicly available works and that reported facts aren't copyrightable, citing studies that ChatGPT outputs don't substitute for Times journalism.
- OpenAI invoked two California federal court decisions — Kadrey v. Meta and Bartz v. Anthropic — that found AI training on copyrighted works constituted "fair use" because it was transformative; Microsoft made similar arguments for its Copilot product.
- The Times distinguished those rulings, arguing those plaintiffs failed to show AI outputs competed with their products, and urged the New York court to apply binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedents instead of recent lower-court decisions.
- The Justice Department filed a brief Thursday supporting OpenAI, arguing that training large language models on millions of digital works delivers a transformative public benefit that offsets competitive harm to publishers.
- District Judge Sidney Stein is expected to rule in the coming months on whether the case, or key portions of it, should advance to trial next year.
Why it matters: A ruling for the Times could force AI companies to license journalism archives rather than scrape them, reshaping a core AI business input; a ruling for OpenAI and Microsoft would weaken publishers' leverage to monetize their content against AI platforms. The DOJ's siding with OpenAI signals the Trump administration views AI development as central to its national security and economic agenda, adding federal weight to the fair-use argument.
Ask SkimNews
