News Outlets Challenge Microsoft-OpenAI 'Fair Use' Claim in A.I. Copyright Case
A major copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI has taken a significant turn as news organizations have requested that a Manhattan Federal Judge reject the tech giants' 'fair use' claim.
The news outlets, which include the Orange County Register, the New York Daily News, and The New York Times, argue that neither Microsoft nor OpenAI employed 'fair use' of their reporting at any stage of the A.I. pipeline, including when acquiring articles behind paywalls and training large language models.
The news organizations claim that OpenAI's chatbots frequently churn out distorted facts in content that resembles news but contains inaccurate information about current events, a phenomenon potentially even more harmful to the market for news.
Making their case, lawyers for the news outlets point out that it would only cost around $6,800 to generate 1 million news-style articles averaging 500 words each without employing a single human author, editor, or reporter. This, they argue, would significantly undercut the financial incentives for journalists and news organizations.
In their motion, Microsoft's lawyers denied that Copilot users use it to learn about news or current events, while OpenAI argued that 'nobody owns facts, just as nobody owns language, grammar, or style.'