A group of eight US newspapers, including The New York Daily News and The Chicago Tribune, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in a New York federal court on Tuesday. They claim that their copyright was infringed upon to train the technology behind the ChatGPT and Copilot chatbots.
These newspapers are owned by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund based in Florida. Alden became the second-largest US newspaper group after acquiring the Tribune publishing chain in 2021.
The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft used millions of copyrighted articles without permission or compensation to develop their AI products. According to the filing, the defendants must obtain consent from the publishers and pay fair value for the use of their content.
OpenAI and Microsoft are also accused of presenting verbatim excerpts of full articles and attributing misleading or inaccurate reporting to the newspapers in certain instances.
Other newspapers joining the suit include The Orlando Sentinel, The Sun Sentinel of Florida, The San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register, and The St. Paul Pioneer Press.
OpenAI responded to the allegations by stating that they take great care in their product development process to support news organizations. They highlighted their partnerships and conversations with various news outlets globally to address concerns and find solutions.
These partnerships include agreements with The Associated Press, Financial Times, Germany’s Axel Springer, French daily Le Monde, and Spanish conglomerate Prisa Media.
This lawsuit echoes a similar case filed by The New York Times in December, where OpenAI was accused of using stolen content to train its AI. OpenAI argued that the use of publicly available data, including news articles, for general training purposes constitutes fair use.
Additionally, OpenAI accused The New York Times of violating ChatGPT’s user guidelines to generate content that favored its case.
