The New York Times Has Spent $10.8M in Its Legal Battle with OpenAI So Far
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Literally, the NYT claimed that OpenAI maintained a database of NYT's works and would just verbatim surface the content. This is not an AI issue, it's settled copyright law.
https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
And OpenAI's defense is here:
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrkxbmgpe/...
OpenAI's defense, which I am not in a position to verify, is that ChatGPT can not be used to reproduce NYT's articles verbatim without a great deal of prompt engineering. That the submissions NYT provided of verbatim reproductions are the result of a third party expert who tried more than 10000 prompts that included feeding into ChatGPT portions of NYT articles in order to get ChatGPT to respond with verbatim reproductions of NYT articles and that no one uses ChatGPT in this manner. Furthermore the verbatim reproductions that ChatGPT did end up producing after these 10000 prompts are available on numerous public websites unaffiliated with NYT.
Someone did though and was able to get verbatim reproductions of NYT articles out of it.
> Furthermore the verbatim reproductions that ChatGPT did end up producing after these 10000 prompts are available on numerous public websites unaffiliated with NYT.
So what? NYT as a copyright holder might have no issue with those unaffiliated sites but have an issue with OpenAI.
Not only that, if something is available on the Internet, and still under copyright, you have no way of knowing whether the website is authorized to distribute it or not.
1. There is little doubt that OpenAI has NYT articles in it's dataset.
2. They claim it's OK because all of the IP is mixed together and effectively laundered.
3. But in fact if you put in a secret code you can get the IP back nearly verbatim.
4. So if OpenAI wins this case we could just trade prompts that regurgitate the articles back without ever visiting NYT.
Corporation vs individual is a distraction. It’s some people (wrongly, in my view) prioritising production over consumption. If this were Altman personally producing an AI, the same people would rally to him.
The corporate/individual framing needlessly inflames the debate when it’s really one about power and money.
We're not debating whether they do. "Humans that write news articles" are producing. That contrasts with "an individual mak[ing] a single copy of a song and giv[ing] it to a friend." We don't put journalists in jail for plagiarism.
I'm guessing you're imagining a scenario here were a journalist has copied an entire article verbatim and republished it in their newspaper. That would actually be both copyright infringement AND plagiarism. Newspapers just rarely enforce that right.
These two things aren't on a scale. They are independent infractions.
OpenAI is "stealing other people's [sic] actual work." The people rallying to it clearly don't care that much about it now. They wouldn't care whether it's a corporation or Sam Altman per se doing it.
https://data.commoncrawl.org/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/inde...
2. I did not see any defense of this nature.
3. Yes and this is the big deal. If the secret code needed to reproduce copyrighted material involves large portions of that copyrighted material already then that's quite a bit different than just verbatim reproductions out of thin air.
4. Yes, if OpenAI wins this case then you could feed into ChatGPT large portions of NYT articles and OpenAI could possibly respond by regurgitating similar such portions of NYT articles in response.
ChatGPT is somewhere in-between - You can't just ask it for a specific NYT article and have it spit it back at you verbatim (NYT acknowledges as such, it took them ~10k prompts to do it), but with enough hints and guesses you can coax it into producing one (along with pretty much anything else you want). The question then becomes whether that's closer to the Pi example (ChatGPT is basically just spitting the prompt back at you), or if it's easy enough to do that it similar to ChatGPT just hosting the article.
Edit: I suppose I'd add, this is also a separate question from the training, training on copyrighted material may or may not be legal regardless of whether the model can verbatim spit the training material back out.
The law doesn't not care about your weird edge cases. What matters is what should be and how we can make it so.
I'm not sure how that could even be controversial. Either it does or doesn't. In this case, it does.
PI is not copyrighted, because that would be silly, but if you were to find the exact bytes in there to reproduce the next Marvel movie and you started sharing that offset, that would probably be copyright infringement. The fact that neither of those numbers were part of the original work, or copyrightable in isolation, or that "technically everything is present in pi", is immaterial. It's obvious to any non-pedantic human being that you're infringing on the creative work.
If I give you a prompt that's just the contents of a NYT article and me telling ChatGPT to say it back to me, is ChatGPT committing the copyright violation by producing the article or am I by creating and sharing the prompt?
Your hypothetical is asinine and completely removed from what is at issue in this lawsuit.
And of course now, reading other posters responding to you in this thread, I'm not the only one pointing out how you are only contributing your own misunderstandings.
There is no reasonable way for us to deliberate on your made up scenarios, because in matters of law the details matter. The website hosting pi could very well be taking part in the copyright infringement, it could also very well not. Our way of weighing those details is the process of the law.
You place the question of PI in a vacuum, asking me if it should be illegal "in principle", but that's not law. The intent, appearance, skill of council, even the judge and jury, will matter if a case had to come up. You cannot separate the idealized question from the messy details of the fleshy humans.
You're saying "it's complicated and lots of factors would come into play", which is the same thing I'm saying. The fact that it spits out copyright-violating text does not necessarily mean ChatGPT is the one at fault, it's messy.
In what way? You don't seem to know what is decided by a jury or what is decided by a judge. Specifically, what do you think the prompt evidences that it is relevant?
> The fact that it spits out copyright-violating text does not necessarily mean ChatGPT is the one at fault, it's messy.
Actually, that's exactly what it means. There is no defense to copyright infringement of the nature you are discussing. OpenAi is responsible for what it ingests, and the fact that use of its tool can result in these outcomes is solely the responsibility of OpenAI and your misunderstandings otherwise are dense and apparently impenetrable.
This seems like the inverse of the old "book cipher" scheme to "avoid" copyright infringement.
If you want to distribute something you're not allowed to, first you find some public data (e.g. a public domain book), then you xor it against the thing you want to distribute. The result is gibberish. Then you distribute the gibberish and the name of the book to use as a key and anyone can use them to recover the original. The "theory" is that neither the gibberish nor the public domain book can be used to recover the original work alone, so neither is infringing by itself, and any given party is only distributing one of them. Obviously this doesn't work and the person distributing the gibberish rather than the public domain book is going to end up in court.
So then which side of the fence is ChatGPT and which side is the text you have to feed it to get it to emit the article? Well, it's the latter that you need access to both the existing ChatGPT and the original article in order to produce.
Notice also that this fails in the same way. The people distributing the text that can be combined with the LLM to reproduce the article are the ones with the clear intention to infringe the copyright. Moreover, you can't produce the prompt that would get ChatGPT to do that unless you already have access to the article, so people without a subscription can't use ChatGPT that way. And, rather importantly, the scheme is completely vacuous. If you already have access to the article needed to generate the relevant prompt and you want to distribute it to someone else, you don't have to give them some prompt they can feed to ChatGPT, you can just give them the text of the article.
You aren't allowed to infringe copyrights just because you make it difficult to do so. OpenAI's system should not be making verbatim copies at all.
LLMs are sort of like a fancy compression dictionary that can be used to compress text, except that we kind of use them in reverse. Instead of compressing likely text into smaller bitstrings, they generate likely text. But you could also use them for compression of text because if you take some text, there is highly likely a much shorter prompt + seed that would generate the same text, provided that it's ordinary text with a common probability distribution.
Which is basically what the lawyers are doing. Keep trying combinations until it generates the text you want.
But the ability to do that isn't really that surprising. If you feed a copyrighted article to gzip, it will give you a much shorter string that you can then feed back to gunzip to get back the article. That doesn't mean gunzip has some flaw or ill intent. It also doesn't imply that the article is even stored inside of the compression library, rather than there just being a shorter string that can be used to represent it because it contains predictable patterns.
It's not implausible that an LLM could generate a verbatim article it was never even trained on if you pushed on it hard enough, especially if it was trained on writing in a similar style and other coverage of the same event.
That'd be a coincidence, not a verbatim copy. Copyright law doesn't prohibit independent creation. This defense isn't available to OpenAI because there is no dispute OpenAI ingested the NYTimes articles in the first place. There is no plausible way OpenAI could say they never had access to the articles they are producing verbatim copies of.
Rather than sneeringly explain away how LLMs work without any eye towards the laws at issue, maybe you should do yourself the favor of learning about them so you can spare us this incessent "no let me explain how they work, it's fine I swear!" shtick.
It would be both. Or to put it a different way, how would you distinguish one from the other?
> This defense isn't available to OpenAI because there is no dispute OpenAI ingested the NYTimes articles in the first place.
The question remains whether ingesting the article is the reason it gets output in response to a given prompt, when it could have happened either way.
And in cases where you don't know, emitting some text is not conclusive evidence that it was in the training data. Most of the text emitted by LLMs isn't verbatim from the training data.
> Rather than sneeringly explain away how LLMs work without any eye towards the laws at issue, maybe you should do yourself the favor of learning about them so you can spare us this incessent "no let me explain how they work, it's fine I swear!" shtick.
This is a case of first impression. We don't really know what they're going to do yet. But "there exists some input that causes it to output the article" isn't any kind of offensive novelty; lots of boring existing stuff does that when the input itself is based on the article.
No, it's not both. Have you engaged in any effort to understand the law here? Copyright doesn't prohibit independent creation. I'm not sure how much more simple I can make that for you. In one scenario there is copying, in the other there isn't. The facts make it clear, when something is copied it is illegal.
>The question remains whether ingesting the article is the reason it gets output in response to a given prompt, when it could have happened either way.
This can't actually be serious? This isn't credible. You are saying there is no difference between ingesting it and outputting the results vs not ingesting it and outputting the results. Anything to back this up at all?
>This is a case of first impression. We don't really know what they're going to do yet. But "there exists some input that causes it to output the article" isn't any kind of offensive novelty; lots of boring existing stuff does that when the input itself is based on the article.
"First impression" (something you claim) doesn't mean ignore existing copyright law. One side is arguing this isn't first impression at all, it's just rote copying.
> But "there exists some input that causes it to output the article" isn't any kind of offensive novelty
You said its novel, I called it plain copying.
>lots of boring existing stuff does that when the input itself is based on the article.
You are saying its first impression... not me.
As soon as OpenAI repeats a set of words verbatim, it violates copyright.
The courts should examine how much damage an occasional verbatim regurgitation would damage NYTs business. (I would guess not much)
It would not be. Independent creation is a complete defense against copyright infringement.
Patents, however, do work this way.
https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine
https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-128/creating-around-c...
That's really stupid. It's akin to claiming that I can serve pirated copyrighted content from my server, just as long as it's served from a really convoluted path. If you can get to it through any path, it's infringing. The path literally doesn't matter; it's a total red herring.
> Furthermore the verbatim reproductions that ChatGPT did end up producing after these 10000 prompts are available on numerous public websites unaffiliated with NYT.
Also stupid. So it's only piracy if you download it from the original source, and somehow not-piracy if you download it from another pirate? Or every single commercially released movie is fair game to distribute, because they're already being served up on numerous pirate BitTorrent sites?
If i have a copy of a movie I am infridging copyright. Why is Open Ai special ?
Because it's Microsoft /s
I think it’s ultimately about whether training on copyrighted content is legal or not.
Here are some other quotes from the lawsuit that approach it from a different angle: “These tools also wrongly attribute false information to The Times.” “By providing Times content without The Times’s permission or authorization, Defendants’ tools undermine and damage The Times’s relationship with its readers and deprive The Times of subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.”
Even if the first argument fails, if the second argument wins, it still boils down to not being able to train on copyrighted content unless it is possible to train on copyrighted data without ultimately quoting that content or attributing anything to the author of that content. My (uneducated) guess is that’s not possible.
News flash: you can read newspaper articles at the library.
Reading an article != selling a product that redistributes the article.
It is.
The bulk of the complaint is a narrative; it's meant to be a persuasive story that seeks to put OpenAI in a bad light. You don't really get to the specific causes of action until page 60 (paragraphs 158-180). A sample of the specific allegations that comprise the elements of each cause of action are:
160. By building training datasets containing millions of copies of Times Works, including by scraping copyrighted Times Works from The Times’s websites and reproducing such works from third-party datasets, the OpenAI Defendants have directly infringed The Times’s exclusive rights in its copyrighted works.
161. By storing, processing, and reproducing the training datasets containing millions of copies of Times Works to train the GPT models on Microsoft’s supercomputing platform, Microsoft and the OpenAI Defendants have jointly directly infringed The Times’s exclusive rights in its copyrighted works.
162. On information and belief, by storing, processing, and reproducing the GPT models trained on Times Works, which GPT models themselves have memorized, on Microsoft’s supercomputing platform, Microsoft and the OpenAI Defendants have jointly directly infringed The Times’s exclusive rights in its copyrighted works.
163. By disseminating generative output containing copies and derivatives of Times Works through the ChatGPT offerings, the OpenAI Defendants have directly infringed The Times’s exclusive rights in its copyrighted works.
"Ask forgiveness, not permission" is supposed to be the Silicon Valley motto. But that's not what happening here. OpenAI is asking for permission. As with all the other publishers, OpenAI will have to pay. NYT reserves the right to set the price as high as it wishes. No doubt the price will be enough cover NYT's costs from this litigation. OpenAI will pay it.
How much has OpenAI spent on this litigation.
- OpenAI created their models by parsing the internet by disregarding the copyrights, licenses, etc., or looking for a law loopholes
- by doing that, OpenAI (alongside others) developed a new progressive tool that is shaping the world, and seems to be the next “internet”-like (impact-wise) thing
- NYT is not happy about that, as their content is their main asset
- less democratic countries, can apply even less ethical practices for data mining, as the copyright laws don't work there, so one might claim that it's a question of national defense, considering the fact that AI is actively used in the miltech these days
- while the ethical part is less controversial (imho, as I'm with NYT there), the legal one is more complicated: the laws might simply say nothing about this use case (think GPL vs. AGPL license), so the world might need new ones.
And so on...
Well old chap, you'll need a shoeshine box full of vacuum tubes and some brass flanges...
Easily.
Copyright only protects the actual text. LLMs have weights, not exact copies. In any case, saying "if I put in some input and get copyrighted output" is tantamount to copyright violations; if I use a generative tool and generate copyrighted info is it the tools fault?
An LLM is a dump of effectively arbitrary numbers that, when hooked up to a command line, uses one of the world's most awful programming languages to evaluate and execute.
OpenAI at most broke an EULA or some technicality on copyright w.r.t. local ephemeral copies. What's the damage to the NYT though?
Following this logic a lossily compressed image is completely unprotected by copyright.
> In any case, saying "if I put in some input and get copyrighted output" is tantamount to copyright violations; if I use a generative tool and generate copyrighted info is it the tools fault?
Do you not think this is obviously fact-specific? If I gzip a bunch of (copyrighted) files, then obviously that doesn't somehow make distributing them not infringement. If I now replace the tool = ungzip + input = files combination with tool = (ungzip and files) and input = (selection mechanism over files) do you think that in the second case distributing the tool is not infringement? I don't mean to say that any of these is precisely the same as the LLM case, but I think your argument is clearly overbroad.
> OpenAI at most broke an EULA or some technicality on copyright w.r.t. local ephemeral copies. What's the damage to the NYT though?
One obvious damage claim (if you are skeptical of market harm wrt newspaper/oneline sub sales) is that they were entitled to the FMV of licensing costs of the articles, which is not so hard to value: OpenAI has entered such agreements with AP and others. [0]
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/openai-chatgpt-associated-press-a...
Even a translation of original text into another language is copyright infringement.
The real question is if LLMs are fair use, and on the basis of the standard tests for fair use, it seems quite doubtful.
Copyright protects against both derived works and copies in any form, including lossy or inaccurate copies that do not reach the originality level to be derived works, not just “exact copies”.
But that doesn't really matter, here, because OpenAI isn't being sued for producing and distributing an LLM (against a mere LLM distributor, NYT would have a much weaker case), they are being sued for providing a service which takes in copyrighted works and spits out copies, both exact and not, that are well within the established coverage of what is a copyright violation that does not fall within exceptions like fair use. and when they control the whole path in between original and copy, then the path in between is largely immaterial.
Its not an “is training AI on copyright protected works fair use” case, its an “is producing copies well within the established parameters of commercial copright violation rendered fair use by sticking an LLM in the middle of the process as part of the mechanism of copying” case.
Also, has anything changed WRT Ian Miles Cheong's credibility? He's been a far-right grifter for years, I wouldn't trust any data he puts out without a corroborating source.
You make insinuations without a shred of relevant evidence. Your tinfoil hat is on too tight.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/business/trump-politico-u...
Incredible.
The foundation of fair use is a transformative and non-consumptive use of copyrighted material.
$10.8 ~ 135 days * 8 hours * $1000/h x10
why they're this expensive?
It seems to me more like the lack of a "Walmart Law" is a result of e.g. lack of economies of scale and other economic structure, rather than some collective agreement. (If it was profitable to break out of that agreement and start a "Walmart Law", it seems we'd see that happen pretty quickly?)
But if you know more about this and I'm off the mark I'd love to learn
Median lawyer rates are more like $200-300/h, with variations depending on locality--a lawyer in NYC is going to be much more expensive than a lawyer in middle-of-nowhere, Kentucky.
As for why they're expensive, part of the answer is because legal training (i.e., law school) is expensive, and lawyers have to pay their student debt.
If you want a random lawyer, you can get them very cheap. But if you're doing M&A or serious corp litigation, you're looking at a much smaller and more expensive pool of candidates. I was shocked by how much our M&A lawyers cost.
All this is to say: the median might not be telling most of the story here.