U.S. government sides with OpenAI in New York Times copyright lawsuit

The US Justice Department has sided with OpenAI in a lawsuit brought by the New York Times. The lawsuit, filed in late 2023, alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft used millions of articles from the Times without permission to train their artificial intelligence models.

The Justice Department argues that training AI models on written works is "exceedingly transformative", allowing it to benefit from the fair use exception, which permits copyrighted work to be used without the rights holder's consent. According to the department, the "creative possibilities and public benefits" of large language model training outweigh any competitive harm.

The department also claims that the Times' interpretation of the law would create an anti-competitive entry barrier that would primarily benefit old mainstream media companies. The Justice Department's 20-page document states that constraining large language model development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would hinder American prosperity and economic mobility.

Brief written by urgent.news from Toronto Sun, Free Malaysia Today, Punch, Punch Nigeria, Insurance Journal — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.