Federal judge allows New York Times' OpenAI lawsuit to proceed

A federal judge has allowed a lawsuit brought by the New York Times against OpenAI to proceed, promising to "expeditiously" issue an opinion on the matter. 

Judge Sidney Stein, of the Southern District of New York, said in an order Wednesday that the court denied OpenAI's motions to dismiss direct infringement claims and copyright infringement claims brought by the Times, and co-plaintiffs, The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Stein narrowed the scope of the lawsuit and also denied OpenAI's motions to dismiss the state and federal trademark dilution claims by the Daily News. 

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"The Court will issue an Opinion setting forth the reasons for this ruling expeditiously," Stein wrote. No trial date has been set.

The lawsuit, first brought by the Times in 2023 against OpenAI and its largest supporter, Microsoft, alleges that the maker of ChatGPT unlawfully used the more than 170-year-old newspaper's work to train its chatbots. 

"Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence ('GenAI') tools rely on large-language models ('LLMs') that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more," the lawsuit says. 

The lawsuit claims that while defendants "engaged in widescale copying from many sources," OpenAI "gave Times content particular emphasis when building their LLMs – revealing a preference that recognizes the value of those works." 

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"Using the valuable intellectual property of others in these ways without paying for it has been extremely lucrative for Defendants," the lawsuit says. "Microsoft’s deployment of Times-trained LLMs throughout its product line helped boost its market capitalization by a trillion dollars in the past year alone. And OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT has driven its valuation to as high as $90 billion." 

Steven Lieberman, an attorney representing the Times and the other publishers, championed the judge's order in a statement to NPR. 

"We appreciate the opportunity to present a jury with the facts about how OpenAI and Microsoft are profiting wildly from stealing the original content of newspapers across the country," Lieberman reportedly said. 

In a statement to NPR, OpenAI spokesman Jason Deutrom welcomed how Stein narrowed the scope of the lawsuit and the company's attorneys "look forward to making it clear that we build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner grounded in fair use, and supportive of innovation."

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In its legal battle against the world-renowned newspaper, OpenAI has pointed to the "fair use" legal doctrine to justify its mass scrapping of data.