01/09/2024

What Leading IP Lawyers Say about The New York Times' Copyright Case Against OpenAI

At issue is the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transitioning from a 2023 electrified by ChatGPT to a 2024 when the tech industry and the Fortune 500 will try to make new "transformer" based language models perform meaningful work and create real value. But that transition could be seriously slowed because of the way AI companies routinely train their models. that is, by feeding them large amounts of data, some of it copyrighted, that they scrape from the web.

A number of copyright lawsuits were filed by copyright holders against AI companies in 2023, but The New York Times suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, filed late last month, is the first from a major news media publisher. The case may come to be seen as a landmark that clarifies the rights and responsibilities of copyright holders and AI companies.

At issue is the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute and how it applies to AI companies' use of information culled from the public internet to train models.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.