6 May 16-22, 2024 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | music | cafe | culture | Night+Day | news | letters | coNteNts | PAPER CHASE Florida newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft over copyright infringement. BY ALEX DELUCA A group of U.S. newspa- pers, including the Or- lando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sen- tinel, claim Chat GPT-maker OpenAI and Microsoft took mil- lions of copyrighted articles “without permission and without payment” to power their artificial intelligence products. In a lawsuit filed April 30 in the Southern District of New York, eight prominent daily papers owned by investment giant Alden Global Capital claim OpenAI and Microsoft stole vast amounts of news content to input into their AI tools in violation of copyright law. The AI products regurgitated the material to users, sometimes in a form only slightly altered from the original articles, the newspapers say. “This lawsuit is not a battle between new technology and old technology. It is not a bat- tle between a thriving industry and an indus- try in transition. It is most surely not a battle to resolve the phalanx of social, political, moral, and economic issues that GenAI raises,” the complaint reads. “This lawsuit is about how Microsoft and OpenAI are not en- titled to use copyrighted newspaper content to build their new trillion-dollar enterprises, without paying for that content.” In the federal complaint, the newspapers also accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of remov- ing journalists’ bylines from their work when responding to queries with information they reported. In some cases, the lawsuit claims, the AI falsely attributed reporting to the newspa- pers — in effect tarnishing their reputations. Attorneys for the newspapers are seeking an unspecified amount in monetary damages and demanding that the companies to stop using the outlets’ copyrighted work. The case was filed by the New York Daily News, Chi- cago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pio- neer Press. “The publishers have spent billions of dol- lars sending real people to real places to re- port on real events in the real world and distribute that reporting in their print news- papers and on their digital platforms. Yet De- fendants are taking the publishers’ work with impunity,” the lawsuit alleges. OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research laboratory, was formed in 2015 with the backing of current CEO Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other prominent tech figures including PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman, and computer scientist John Schulman. The company’s flagship ChatGPT product relies on scraped data from various sources on the internet. Though users have reported using Chat- GPT to bypass paywalled news sites, OpenAI maintains it the tool will not breach paywalls. The company suspended its “Browse” feature shortly after activation last summer after folks noticed the feature could be employed to bypass news sites’ paywalls. “If a user specifically asks for a URL’s full text, it may inadvertently fulfill this request. We are disabling Browse while we fix this — want to do right by content owners,” the company said in July 2023. As the lawsuit points out, Ope- nAI’s store has of- fered third-party tools specifically designed to bypass paywalls, such the custom GPT called “Legal Paywall Remover.” The Alden Global-owned outlets’ case is the latest instance of major publishers taking OpenAI to court; last year, the New York Times filed a similar copyright infringement lawsuit against the company. The latest suit cites instances of ChatGPT al- legedly stealing excerpts from the South Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper and reproducing them in its responses — in some cases, with slightly different wording from the original article. For example, when asked to provide the exact text of the first several paragraphs of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning Sun Sentinel article “Hide, deny, spin, threaten: How the school district tried to mask failures that led to Parkland shooting,” as well as a short sum- mary, ChatGPT responded with near-verba- tim excerpts from the original article. While the actual article reads “Immedi- ately after 17 people were murdered inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School...,” the excerpt produced by ChatGPT states “Minutes after 17 people were murdered in- side Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School...,” according to the lawsuit. OpenAI has long insisted that its use of newspapers’ articles is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of American copyright law, which allows for the use of a work without permission in certain instances, including criticism, research and news reporting. However, legal experts say that it will likely take years of drawn-out court battles to determine whether tech companies like Ope- nAI have actually violated the law. In some cases, media companies have agreed to strike paid deals with OpenAI. Last year, the Associated Press made a deal with OpenAI in which the tech company would pay an undisclosed fee to license AP’s news archive. The artificial intelligence company has also made licensing deals with other news giants like Germany’s Axel Springer and France’s Le Monde newspaper. In the New York Times case, OpenAI has argued that the newspaper employed “decep- tive prompts” in an attempt to induce Ope- nAI’s product to produce verbatim excerpts of articles. The company argued the prompts themselves, not the product, violated copy- right law. Attorneys for Microsoft and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. [email protected] A group of newspapers is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly violating copyright law by copying news articles. Photo by Arkadiusz Warguła/Getty Images | METRO | “THIS LAWSUIT IS NOT A BATTLE BETWEEN NEW TECHNOLOGY AND OLD TECHNOLOGY.”
