8 US newspapers sue ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement
- The lawsuit is the latest against OpenAI and Microsoft to land at Manhattan’s federal court, where the firms are already battling a series of other lawsuits
- Tech companies have argued that taking troves of publicly accessible internet content to train their AI systems is protected by the ‘fair use’ doctrine
A group of eight US newspapers is suing ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the technology companies have been “purloining millions” of copyrighted news articles without permission or payment to train their artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post and other papers filed the lawsuit Tuesday in a New York federal court.
“We’ve spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news at our publications, and we can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense,” said a written statement from Frank Pine, executive editor for the MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing.
The other newspapers that are part of the lawsuit are MediaNews Group’s Mercury News, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer-Press, and Tribune Publishing’s Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel. All of the newspapers are owned by Alden Global Capital.
Microsoft declined to comment on Tuesday.
