The Times was the first major American media company to sue Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Microsoft and OpenAI, like other A.I. companies, have built their technology by feeding it large amounts of digital data, some of which is likely copyrighted. They claim they can legally use such material to train their systems without paying for it because it is public and they are not reproducing the material in its entirety.
Key takeaways:
- Microsoft has filed a motion to dismiss parts of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company, which accused Microsoft and OpenAI of infringing on its copyrights by using its articles to train A.I. technologies.
- Microsoft argued that large language models, the technologies that drive chatbots, did not supplant the market for news articles and other materials they were trained on, comparing them to videocassette recorders which are allowed under the law.
- The Times was the first major American media company to sue Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works.
- Microsoft claimed that training the technology on such articles was “fair use” under the law because chatbots were a “transformative” technology that created something new with copyrighted material.