OpenAI And Microsoft Dragged To Court Over Copyright Infringement

Several news organizations, including the New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel, Chicago Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, and four more firms are filing a case against Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement allegations.

These publications are owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, and they claim that both OpenAI and Microsoft trained on their content without any permission or compensation.

The plaintiffs also put forward evidence including several excerpts from conversations with ChatGPT and Copilot. The evidence showed that both AI chatbots regenerated lengthy excerpts of specific articles on command, showcasing that their training datasets included the content from those articles.

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Did OpenAI And Microsoft Use Copyrighted Content?

The plaintiffs also showed screenshots of Copilot, which is capable of searching the web in real-time, regenerating entire new articles after some days the original articles were published, without giving “a prominent hyperlink” to the original article. The companies also alleged that these chatbots often attribute false information to publications.

“This lawsuit is not a battle between new technology and old technology. It is not a battle between a thriving industry and an industry in transition. It is most surely not a battle to resolve the phalanx of social, political, moral, and economic issues that GenAI raises. This lawsuit is about how Microsoft and OpenAI are not entitled to use copyrighted newspaper content to build their new trillion-dollar enterprises without paying for that content,” the complaint reads. 

As per the publications, firms that make use of copyrighted content to train their AI models “must obtain the publishers’ consent to use their content and pay fair value for such use.”

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Can AI Models Be Trained Without Copyrighted Content?

The complaint also emphasizes the comments made by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said that AI models cannot be trained without copyrighted material. The complaint also points out that OpenAI showcased the ability to bypass paywalls and that its AI models are also capable of blocking chatbots from churning out copyrighted work, but OpenAI never really deployed that functionality.

The lawsuit also has similar claims that were made by companies and news publications that sued Microsoft and OpenAI before. The New York Times filed a case back in December last year, claiming ChatGPT reproduces its journalism verbatim.

OpenAI is seeking to dismiss NYT’s case, claiming the publication manipulated ChatGPT into reproducing its content. Similarly, Microsoft invoked the VCR claiming AI models are just tools, that could be used for copyright infringement, but “are capable of substantial lawful use.”