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Eight more papers sue big bad AI for copyright infringement
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: July 26, 2024
It’s the big party that no one wanted to get invited to.
In the third wave of newspaper copyright infringement cases against AI scraping, eight newspapers have sued Open AI (ChatGPT) and Microsoft for taking their copyrighted materials to train their large language model chatbots (otherwise, inappropriately, dubbed “AI”).
The papers this time are the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer Press.
The case was filed in April in the Southern District of New York, and follows similar cases filed by the New York Times and by a group of progressive publications led by The Intercept and Raw Story, which were covered previously in this column.
The nearly 300-page complaint, accompanied by an ocean of exhibits, makes the forceful, and logical, statement that, at a $90 billion evaluation, Open AI can no longer be considered a nonprofit and should be held liable for copyright theft as it is no longer a cute little puppy peeing on the papers.
The complaint alleged that the chatbots found a way to get behind paywalls and scrape copyrighted materials, which they then used without remuneration, credit, or links back to the original, all in contravention of copyright law.
The complaint also alleges that the chatbots falsely said that some of the copyrighted articles were false/misleading, essentially accusing actual journalists of the kinds of hallucinations that the chatbots themselves often manifest.
For instance, the complaint alleges that a chatbot said that the Denver Post published an article that stated that smoking could cure asthma.
Sheesh. Hard to tell what’s real anymore, isn’t it?
Or maybe that’s the point.
A number of other publications, including the Financial Times group and others, have licensed their copyrighted material to the AI scrapers.
No word if these sources have also had their journalistic integrity questioned. But I’ve been around AI chatbots enough to be able to answer that question.
Yeah, this isn’t the end of this story.
Thanks for the analysis to Pramod Chintalapoodi at the Chip Law Group (via Lexology).