Microsoft seeks dismissal of part of The New York Times' lawsuit in AI data copyright case

Microsoft Corp. has asked a federal court to dismiss part of a lawsuit filed against it by The New York Times. The publication accuses the company and its partner OpenAI of illegally using materials owned by the NYT for training artificial intelligence models.

Here's What We Know

In its motion, Microsoft argues that large language models (LLMs) do not disrupt the market for news articles and other content on which they are trained. The company drew an analogy to VCR technology, which has also been approved by the courts.

"Copyright law is no more an obstacle to the L.L.M. than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, copy machine, personal computer, internet or search engine)", Microsoft said in a statement.

The tech giant is pushing for the dismissal of three parts of the lawsuit because The Times has allegedly failed to prove actual damages from the use of AI. In particular, Microsoft disputes the publication's argument about the loss of revenue from mentions of the NYT-owned recommendation site Wirecutter in chatbots.

The New York Times' lawyer Ian Crosby criticised the corporation's arguments, calling it strange to compare language models to VCRs, which do not copy materials in mass production.

Flashback

The NYT has become the first major US media company to sue Microsoft and OpenAI over AI copyright appropriation. Previously, writers, developers, and other rights holder groups have brought similar suits.

AI development companies argue that they can legally use publicly available data to train their systems without infringing on copyrights. But the NYT cites examples of OpenAI AI reproducing passages from newspaper articles almost verbatim.

Go Deeper:

• The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over its use of the publication's materials for AI training
• OpenAI accused the New York Times of tricking ChatGPT into reproducing copyrighted articles

Source: The New York Times