AI: Copyright Challenges Now Include a New York Times Lawsuit

In the still of the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, The New York Times ran its story announcing its lawsuit of OpenAI and Microsoft over what the Times claims is millions of its articles "used to train chatbots that now compete with it."

"If the Times and other news organizations cannot produce and protect their independent journalism, there will be a vacuum that no computer or artificial intelligence can fill."
New York Times court filing

As Michael M. Grynbaum and Ryan Mac

The time when computers were toys for bright boys and had names like Apple, Tangerine or Pet are history. Apple evolved into Mac or Macintosh after a brief flirtation with the lovely Lisa. The original company name lives on in the website title for the Mac. Downloads http://www.info.apple.com/support/downloads.html

write in the December 27 story, "The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular AI platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works.

 

Extract

"The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by the Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information."

Particularly in light of the European Union's "AI Act" agreement on December 9-the first comprehensive legislation of its kind, expected to be a model for many world markets beyond Europe-the Times' court action is thought by many to have the potential to mount the first heavyweight opposition to what many in publishing believe is rampant copyright infringement in the development of the large language models on which many generative AI systems are built.