New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and other cases
The NYT claimed that these companies use information from multiple sources to develop AI products.
However, they give The NYT content special emphasis and “seek to free-ride on the Times’s massive investment in journalism” without permission or payment.
This reduces readers’ perceived need to visit the Times website, potentially reducing advertising and subscription revenue.
Examples of many ChatGPT and Bing Chat (Copilot) outputs were provided, which were almost verbatim copies of The NYT articles with no attribution.
The Times claimed that although it had contacted these companies, talks to find “an amicable resolution” had come to a standstill.
The complaint also addressed the problem of AI “hallucinations”, in which incorrect material is mistakenly credited to The Times.
Furthermore, it wanted that any chatbot models and training data utilising Times copyrighted content be destroyed.
However, OpenAI argues that since using copyrighted content to train GenAI models “serves a new ‘transformative’ purpose”, their actions should be permitted under “fair use”. It goes without saying that The NYT disagreed.
Other cases
Even earlier, lawsuits were brought against AI services for using unpaid web content scraping. Several authors, including George Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and John Grisham, sued a few GenAI companies, alleging “systematic theft on a mass scale”.
Philip Pullman and Margaret Atwood have signed an open letter demanding payment for the use of their works by AI companies.
Alleging code misuse in Copilot training, some IT professionals have sued OpenAI, Microsoft, and GitHub. Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt were sued by visual artists for infringement of their copyrights.
Getty Images also sued Stability AI.
Universal Music Group urged Spotify and Apple Music to prevent scraping its material to train AI bots to make new songs.
And so forth. But it is the first instance of a U.S. media house of significance suing Big Tech for such copyright infringement.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to revive a challenge to Google’s digital library of millions of books seven years ago.
The Times, however, has drawn comparisons between its move and a copyright lawsuit that dates back more than 20 years against Napster, in which record companies accused the file-sharing service of using their content unlawfully.
In this GenAI era, the current lawsuit undoubtedly opens up a new legal frontier.
It may redefine legal contours around intellectual property rights in the U.S. and establish global precedents at a time when most regulatory frameworks, including those in India, are falling behind.
An epic battle pits push-button information generated by AI against labour-intensive human newsgathering.
From a legal perspective, it is a classic case of established law lagging behind new technology.
The victory of Big Tech might deter human content producers.
The NYT prevails, GenAI companies might be required to compensate content producers for their use, which would significantly increase the cost of GenAI models.
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