And while Silicon Valley is turning a profit, the newspaper industry from which it is harvesting content is in dire straits. But the newspapers said that their problem with the A.I. companies’ behavior was not strictly about dollars and cents. “This issue is not just a business problem for a handful of newspapers or the newspaper industry at large,” they argued. “It is a critical issue for civic life in America. Indeed, local news is the bedrock of democracy and its continued existence is put at risk by [the] Defendants’ actions.”
Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft have filed responses to the lawsuit so far. In similar cases, however, they have argued that their actions are protected by fair use, a doctrine in copyright law that allows for unauthorized uses in some circumstances. The New York Times sued both companies last December for similarly large-scale copyright infringement, alleging that it had first tried without success to reach an “amicable resolution” on commercial licensing.
In its motion to dismiss the case in March, Microsoft said that fair use also applied to any alleged use of Times articles. “Despite The Times’s contentions, copyright law is no more an obstacle to the LLM than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, copy machine, personal computer, internet, or search engine),” the tech giant claimed. “Content used to train LLMs does not supplant the market for the works, it teaches the models language.”