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Eight newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital, including New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Sun Sentinel, Denver Post, Orange County Register, and St. Paul Pioneer Press, have launched a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft alleging copyright infringement.
The news outlets filed a complaint in the U.S. Southern District of New York. They claimed that both OpenAI and Microsoft used their articles for training without proper authorisation or compensation.
The lawsuit presents compelling evidence, including excerpts from interactions with ChatGPT and Copilot, demonstrating how these AI systems reproduced substantial portions of specific articles upon command. This suggests that the training data used by these systems included copyrighted texts from the news organisations in question.
“Microsoft and OpenAI simply take the work product of reporters, journalists, editorial writers, editors and others who contribute to the work of local newspapers — all without any regard for the efforts, much less the legal rights, of those who create and publish the news on which local communities rely,” said the lawsuit.
One of the central issues raised in the complaint is the lack of appropriate attribution and payment for using copyrighted material. Screenshots provided as evidence show instances where Copilot replicated entire news articles shortly after publication without prominently linking back to the source.
Additionally, concerns were raised about these AI systems attributing false information or misconceptions to the publications.
At the heart of the conflict is the contention that corporations such as OpenAI and Microsoft must seek permission from publishers to utilise their copyrighted materials and compensate them fairly for such use.
“The Publishers have spent billions of dollars sending real people to real places to report on real events in the real world and distribute that reporting in their print newspapers and on their digital platforms. Yet Defendants are taking the Publishers’ work with impunity and are using the Publishers’ journalism to create GenAI products that undermine the Publishers’ core businesses by retransmitting “their content”– in some cases verbatim for the Publishers’ paywalled websites — to their readers,” complained the newspapers.
The complaint cites remarks from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, emphasising the significance of copyrighted content in training AI models. Moreover, it raises concerns about OpenAI’s capacity to circumvent paywalls and the purported absence of measures to prevent the unauthorized replication of copyrighted material.
“Microsoft and OpenAI bizarrely claim they are entitled to copy and use any written product they want to train their GenAI systems. Microsoft and OpenAI also say even after their systems are trained, they are entitled to copy local newspapers daily and store the newspapers’ content on their servers as source materials for their GenAI products’ output,” claimed the lawsuit.
This lawsuit echoes similar claims made by other news organisations against OpenAI and Microsoft and The New York Times initiated legal proceedings in December 2023, alleging that ChatGPT reproduced its journalism verbatim. Digital news platforms like The Intercept, AlterNet, and Raw Story filed legal actions in February 2024.
OpenAI responded to the NYT’s lawsuit by alleging manipulation of ChatGPT to reproduce its content faithfully. Microsoft defended AI models as tools with substantial lawful use, drawing comparisons to the VCR argument from the past, reports The Verge.
OpenAI has recently partnered with the Financial Times to harness its content. The company has similar arrangements with Associated Press, Axel Springer, Le Monde, and Prisa Media.
The ongoing litigation underscores the complex intersection of AI technology, copyright law, and tech companies’ responsibilities toward content creators. The outcome of this battle could have potential implications for the use of copyrighted materials and fair compensation by the AI industry to original content creators.
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