“Independent journalism is vital to our democracy. It is also increasingly rare and valuable. For more than 170 years, The Times has given the world deeply reported, expert, independent journalism. Times journalists go where the story is, often at great risk and cost, to inform the public about important and pressing issues.” This statement opened the NY Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023.
The Times was succinct in its claim: “Defendants’ unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service. Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) tools rely on large-language models (“LLMs”) that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more…
“Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.”
How exact was it?
The initial lawsuit contained many examples of New York Times written copy and its recitation, barely altered, by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.
According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT has also fabricated (“hallucinated”) articles that it has attributed to the New York Times
One legal analysis
In March 2024, Harvard Law Today published a legal analysis by Mason Kortz, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, who said that The Times had three copyright claims: 1) OpenAI violated the right to reproduction, 2) that the end result of the model’s ‘training’ was a copy or a derivative work of copyrighted work, and 3) that an AI-generated result was a separate copyright violation because it reproduces copyrighted expression that is owned by the New York Times. He said that the first claim was the strongest, and the other two had “room for play.”
Conflicting decisions
In early April, more than two years into the New York Times case, a Federal judge gave a partial win to each party. In favor to The New York Times, the judge rejected OpenAI’s claim that the infringement claims were made for content that was more than three years old and therefore should be dismissed.
In OpenAI’s favor, the judge rejected the Times’ claim that by using the Times’ content without license or compensation, OpenAI was engaging in unfair competition. OpenAI has been hoping that its use of Times content constituted Fair Use, meaning that under some circumstances, the content can be used without license.
According to a Reuters report, the Times could continue to pursue claims that OpenAI’s output contained copyrighted materal leading to infringement, which is contrary to decisions by California judges in similar cases, which dismissed those plaintiffs’ copyright claims.
Cases combined
At the end of March 2025, Reuters reported that a US judicial panel decided to combine this New York Times lawsuit with several California lawsuits of a similar nature by comedian Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, authors John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and George RR Martin.
Each side reiterated their positions: The plaintiffs looking forward to proving that the defendents engaged in widespread theft, while the defendants said their models were trained on publicly available data under Fair Use doctrine.
Further reading
NY Times Company, Daily News LP et al, Center for Investigative Reporting (Plaintiffs) v OpenAI, Microsoft, et al. Document 514. Case 1:23-cv-11195. Filed April 4, 2025. US District Court for Southern District of New York
Judge explains order for New York Times in OpenAI copyright case. Article. April 4, 2025. by Blake Brittain. Reuters.
OpenAI copyright lawsuits from authors, New York Times consolidated in Manhattan. Article. April 3, 2025. by Blake Brittain. Reuters.
ChatNYT. Harvard Law expert in technology and the law says the New York Times lawsuit against ChatPT parent OoenAI is the first big test for AI in the copyright space. Article. March 22, 2024. by Rachel Reed. Harvard Law Today
The New York Times Company (Plaintiff) v Microsoft Corporation, OpenAI, Inc., et al. (Defendants). Document 1. Case 1:23-cv-11195. Filed December 27, 2023. US District Court for Southern District of New York
The Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft over A.I. use of copyrighted work. Article. December 27, 2023. by Michael M Grynbaum and Ryan Mac. The New York Times
Why it matters
The New York Times case does not specify a specific demand for damages, but clearly stakes a claim that its content is valuable to the defendants at the outset of the initial lawsuit: “Microsoft’s deployment of Times-trained LLMs throughout its product line helped boost its market capitalization by a trillion dollars in the past year alone. And OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT has driven its valuation to as high as $90 billion. Defendants’ GenAI business interests are deeply intertwined.”
Decisions in this case will have far-reaching impact on the interpretation of copyright law with respect to artificial intelligence platforms. Courts have already ruled that content which is fully generated by artificial intelligence platforms cannot be copyrighted, but in this case, the content and its copies are nearly identical.
