The court filing in the AI Suit invokes copyright, culture and sports
Court filings filed Friday in a closely watched copyright lawsuit pitting The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft cited a wide range of material, including relevant copyright, arts and sports laws.
A lawsuit filed by The Times in 2023 and joined by a group of other news sites alleges that OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence startup, and its partner Microsoft infringed on the publishers’ copyrighted material by using millions of their articles to train AI technologies. AI companies are now competing with The Times as a source of information, the news site argued in its lawsuit.
The brief, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, largely boils down to two questions: whether the publishers’ news articles were sufficiently “transformed” into an entirely new AI work, and whether the AI produced content that “replaces” the news articles and damages their value.
Friday was the last day the companies could file motions for summary judgment that would start the trial. Judge Sidney H. Stein is expected to issue a sentence in the coming weeks.
The Times argued that its articles were not transformed by technology companies and were not subject to “fair use” protection under copyright law. The Times also claimed that artificial intelligence products from OpenAI and Microsoft acted as substitutes for the outlet’s work. Lawyers told The Times that OpenAI and Microsoft illegally copied articles from news publishers in several ways in the process of creating their AI.
“The future not only of journalism but also of responsible artificial intelligence depends on maintaining incentives for people to produce the creative works on which a healthy society depends,” The Times wrote in its submission.
OpenAI and Microsoft have strongly defended the lawsuit’s claims. In its motion, Microsoft argued that existing copyright law “does not allow rights holders to block transformative technologies,” such as Microsoft’s AI product, called Copilot.
In a separate but similar argument, OpenAI said in its filing that “these technologies put the world’s facts at the fingertips of anyone who asks, in whatever form is most useful to them.”
“That’s progress, and copyright law doesn’t stand in its way,” the filing continued.
The court filings also meandered over a number of subjects, including Lord Byron, Andy Warhol and the old New York Giants baseball team.
In Microsoft’s filing, the company noted that Byron — a 19th-century British poet who thought, the filing says, that “literature and science are at odds” — was the father of Ada Lovelace, widely recognized as the world’s first female computer scientist.
Lovelace, Microsoft wrote, saw early computers as examples of “poetic science” and engines of progress and creativity. The company has seen no better proof of this than the AI programs at the heart of the case.
The Times gave a nod to the case where Warhol ran afoul of copyright law. The court found him guilty of infringing another artist’s photograph of rock star Prince. Warhol created a screen-printed version of the photo, but the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that it was not fair use.
OpenAI spoke more broadly about the breadth of its technology while also winking at the Southern District’s home turf, referencing a web search for the Giants’ 1951 National League pennant. (The team lost to the New York Yankees in the World Series.)
The lawsuit is being closely watched by legal scholars, news publishers and the world’s most powerful technology companies.
Most AI copyright lawsuits are still in the early stages and none have gone to trial. Only a few of them had decisions on fundamental legal issues, according to a hitchhiker founded by Ed Lee, professor at Santa Clara University School of Law.
News organizations said it would be impossible for OpenAI and Microsoft to prove that their products did not harm the news market. The Times claimed that its business was harmed by significantly lower click-through rates for its articles when traditional search links to Times works were replaced by AI-generated summaries in search results.
The replacement is critical to demonstrating that AI systems are not sufficiently transforming works into new forms of expression, The Times and other media organizations said.
Citing expert witnesses, OpenAI argued that The Times and other plaintiffs’ businesses were not harmed because their web traffic was “not adversely affected” by ChatGPT, its popular chatbot.