OpenAI and Microsoft sued by Center for Investigative Reporting over copyright infringement

First, it was the major music labels targeting AI startups for copyright infringement. Now, the news industry has secured a formidable ally in its fight against AI giant OpenAI in a major pushback against AI companies and their alleged exploitative practices.

According to a report from CNBC, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), the country’s oldest nonprofit newsroom, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its primary backer, Microsoft, in federal court. This lawsuit follows similar actions from prominent publications like The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and New York Daily News.

The news comes just days after major record labels including Sony Music, Universal Music Group (UMG), and Warner Records filed lawsuits against generative AI startups Suno and Udio.

This lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, claims that OpenAI “copied, used, abridged, and displayed CIR’s valuable content without CIR’s permission or authorization, and without any compensation to CIR.”

Since its public release in late 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot has been scouring the web to generate answers to user queries, often relying on content directly pulled from news stories.

“When they populated their training sets with works of journalism, Defendants had a choice: to respect works of journalism, or not,” the plaintiffs stated in the lawsuit. “Defendants chose the latter.”

In a press release, Monika Bauerlein, CEO of CIR, accused OpenAI and Microsoft of “free rider behavior.” She asserted, “OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more powerful, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our material. This free rider behavior is not only unfair, it is a violation of copyright. The work of journalists, at CIR and everywhere, is valuable, and OpenAI and Microsoft know it.”

AI Content Use Under Scrutiny

AI products gain more value from a broad spectrum of viewpoints and diverse human creativity. CIR’s journalism often focuses on abuses of power and social justice, making its content particularly unique and valuable.

“For-profit corporations like OpenAI and Microsoft can’t simply treat the work of nonprofit and independent publishers as free raw material for their products,” added Bauerlein. “If this practice isn’t stopped, the public’s access to truthful information will be limited to AI-generated summaries of a disappearing news landscape.”

The lawsuit, based on violations of the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. CIR, which is home to Mother Jones and the radio show Reveal, alleged that OpenAI “trained ChatGPT not to acknowledge or respect copyright. And they did this all without permission.”

The group is seeking “actual damages and Defendants’ profits, or statutory damages of no less than $750 per infringed work and $2,500 per DMCA violation.”

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment. However, an OpenAI spokesperson told CNBC, “We are working collaboratively with the news industry and partnering with global news publishers to display their content in our products like ChatGPT, including summaries, quotes, and attribution, to drive traffic back to the original articles. A component of the partnerships is the ability to leverage publisher content using various machine learning and training techniques to help us optimize the display of that content and make it more useful to users.”

As the news industry struggles to maintain sufficient revenue from advertising and subscriptions, many publications are aggressively defending their content as AI-generated material becomes more common.

The record labels and CIR are not alone. In December, The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming intellectual property violations related to its journalistic content appearing in ChatGPT training data. The Times is seeking billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages for the “unlawful copying and use of the Times’s uniquely valuable works.” OpenAI disputes the Times’ characterization, CNBC reported.

The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers followed with a similar suit in April.

As we also reported in January, prominent authors like Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult also filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement in AI training data for ChatGPT.

Despite these legal challenges, some news organizations are partnering with OpenAI. Earlier on Thursday, OpenAI and Time magazine announced a “multi-year content deal,” granting OpenAI access to current and archived articles from over a century of Time’s history. This partnership will allow OpenAI to display Time’s content within its ChatGPT chatbot and use the material to enhance its AI models.

OpenAI also announced a similar partnership with News Corp. in May, allowing access to content from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, the New York Post, and other publications. Additionally, Reddit has agreed to partner with OpenAI, enabling the company to train its AI models on Reddit content.

This mounting wave of litigation and strategic alliances signifies a crucial turning point in the relationship between the news industry and AI technology, setting the stage for ongoing battles and potential collaborations in the future.