USA: RSF files legal brief supporting news publishers in copyright case against Microsoft and OpenAI
Multiple US news publishers are currently battling OpenAI and Microsoft in court, accusing the tech companies of infringing copyright by copying millions of their articles to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Reporters Without Borders (RSF), along with PEN America, Protect Democracy and First Amendment scholars, filed a brief in support of the publishers’ lawsuit, asserting that this practice amounts to corporate theft and threatens the economic
The lawsuit, brought by the New York Times, argues that OpenAI and Microsoft infringed the publishers’ copyright by using their content to train large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT without permission or compensation. Similar lawsuits brought by the New York Daily Newsand the Center for Investigative Reportinghave been consolidated into this case as well.
The tech companies, backedby the Trump administration’s Department of Justice, maintain that training the models on online content constitutes “fair use.” In its filing to the court, the Justice Department claimed that the public benefits of training the AI models on the news content “far outweigh any competitive harm,” the Associated Pressreported. The brief disputes this, arguing that the output of their LLM chatbots “produce economically competitive substitutes for those articles.” These bots provide users with regurgitated information and, sometimes, verbatim texts, which poses a great threat to the media economy.
Thebrief, filed on October 30, argues that this case risks “jeopardizing the economicorganizations filed the brief on the grounds that the US Constitution calls for copyright laws that “would support rather than destroy the democratic functions of the press.” The brief also describes the historically symbiotic relationship between the Constitution’s protections for press freedom and for intellectual property
“Tech companies cannot be allowed to steal the work of journalists and news organizations to train their AI models, then turn around and make billions off these models that directly compete with the same news organizations. That is not ‘fair use’; it’s theft. The court should uphold publishers’ copyright protections to ensure technological progress does not come at the expense of a free press.
Clayton Weimers
Executive Director, RSF North America
The brief was filed to support the publishers’ motion for summary judgment, which is a court judgment without a full trial. The plaintiffs seek billions of dollars in damages from Microsoft and OpenAI.
Document lié
Brief_OpenAI_copyright_case.pdf
