New York Times, OpenAI And Microsoft Clash In Landmark Copyright Case

According to Axios, the New York Times, OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday presented their arguments to a judge in the newspaper's 2023 copyright lawsuit, with District Judge Sidney Stein expected to rule in the coming months on whether the case, or key portions of it, will go to trial next year. The Times says OpenAI and Microsoft copied its works at scale to build commercial substitutes, while OpenAI argues copyright law allows tech companies to scrape publicly available works to train large language models and that reported facts are not protected. Microsoft made similar arguments for Copilot. OpenAI also cited two recent California federal court rulings, Kadrey v. Meta and Bartz v. Anthropic, which found AI training on copyrighted works was fair use because it was transformative. The Times said those cases do not apply because the plaintiffs there did not show AI outputs competed with their products. On Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department filed a brief backing OpenAI, saying training large language models on millions of digital works provides a transformative public benefit that outweighs any competitive harm to publishers.