Media Outlets Seek Sanctions Against OpenAI Over Copyright Issues
NEW YORK — Several media organizations, including The New York Times and the Daily News, are pressing a federal judge to impose sanctions on OpenAI. This move intensifies an ongoing dispute about artificial intelligence and copyright that holds significant implications for the struggling news industry.
The newspapers assert that OpenAI is withholding crucial evidence in what could become a pivotal copyright infringement case. This case revolves around how OpenAI and Microsoft developed their AI technologies utilizing millions of news articles. A central concern is whether AI chatbots are unfairly competing with traditional journalism, diverting web traffic without engaging in the actual work of reporting the news.
A legal filing submitted in a Manhattan federal court alleges that OpenAI chose to “obstruct” rather than provide datasets and ChatGPT logs, which could clarify how the AI system may have utilized copyrighted news material. The plaintiffs ask the judge to penalize OpenAI for “discovery misconduct,” claiming that a recent deposition from an OpenAI employee contradicts previous assertions made by the company.
Attorney Steven Lieberman, representing the Daily News and several of its affiliated papers, has stated that OpenAI has been “misrepresenting” for the past two years regarding its capability to search for copyrighted content in its AI training datasets and logs.
“This motion seeks to hold OpenAI accountable for concealing and destroying evidence related to how ChatGPT was trained using stolen journalism,” Lieberman mentioned.
OpenAI has not provided an immediate response to requests for comment.
The New York Times filed its initial lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, shortly after ChatGPT’s launch had ignited a commercial AI boom and altered how people gather information online. Concerns about the threat to news outlets increased in 2024 when Google started featuring AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, which limited the advertising revenue for original sources.
Other news organizations, like the Daily News and MediaNews Group, as well as the digital publisher Ziff Davis and the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, have since joined the lawsuit.
OpenAI and several other tech firms argue that the training process for their AI systems, which includes using digitized books and online articles, falls under the “fair use” protections of U.S. copyright law. This claim is currently being tested in numerous lawsuits, as creative professionals from various fields, including visual artists and musicians, challenge AI companies in court, with varied outcomes.
In a notable copyright settlement, OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors for using their pirated works to develop its chatbot, Claude. This amount, while large, is a fraction of Anthropic’s estimated $965 billion market valuation as it prepares to go public.
The arguments presented by The New York Times differ from those of book authors. The Times has centered its case around the unfair competition aspect, claiming that some companies exploit its significant investments in journalism to create competing products without authorization or compensation.
According to regulatory filings, The Times has already spent over $28 million fighting AI companies in court, which includes another lawsuit against AI firm Perplexity. The newspapers are also requesting sanctions that would cover attorney fees for their efforts to obtain “improperly withheld” evidence.
These escalating legal expenses come at a time when more media organizations are entering into licensing agreements with OpenAI and other tech companies like Google and Meta, typically receiving fees in exchange for allowing the training of AI systems on their news content. The Associated Press was the first to enter such an agreement with OpenAI in 2023.
