Court filings made Friday in a closely watched copyright trial pitting The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft invoked a wide range of material, including relevant copyright law, arts and sports.
The suit, filed in 2023 by The Times and joined by a group of other news outlets, claims that OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence start-up, and its partner Microsoft infringed upon the publishers’ copyrighted material by using millions of their articles to train A.I. technologies. A.I. companies now compete with The Times as a source of information, the news outlet argued in its suit.
The briefs, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, largely boiled down to two questions: whether the publishers’ news articles were sufficiently “transformed” into an entirely new work by A.I., and whether A.I. produced content that “substituted” for news articles and harmed their value.
Friday was the last day the companies could file motions for a summary judgment that would head off a trial. Judge Sidney H. Stein is expected to make a ruling in the coming weeks.
The Times claimed that its articles were not transformed by the tech companies and not subject to “fair use” protections under copyright law. The Times also argued that A.I. products from OpenAI and Microsoft acted as a substitute for the outlet’s work. Lawyers for The Times said that OpenAI and Microsoft illegally copied news publishers’ articles in several ways in the process of building their A.I.
“The future not just of journalism but of responsible A.I., too, depends on preserving incentives for humans to produce the creative works on which a healthy society depends,” The Times wrote in its filing.
OpenAI and Microsoft have vigorously defended themselves against the suit’s claims. In its motion, Microsoft argued that existing copyright law “does not permit rights holders to block transformative technologies,” such as Microsoft’s A.I. product called Copilot.
In a separate but similar argument, OpenAI said in its filing that “these technologies put the world’s facts within reach of anyone who asks, in whatever form is most useful to them. That is progress, and copyright law does not stand in its way.”
The court filings also meandered through a range of topics, including Lord Byron, the artist Andy Warhol and the old New York Giants baseball team.
In Microsoft’s filing, the company noted that Byron — the 19th-century British poet who thought, the filing said, that “literature and science were at odds” — was the father of Ada Lovelace, who was recognized by many as the world’s first computer scientist.
Lovelace, Microsoft wrote, saw early computers as examples of “poetical science” and engines of progress and creativity. The company saw no better proof of that than the A.I. programs at the heart of the case.
The Times nodded to an instance when Mr. Warhol fell afoul of copyright law. A court found him guilty of infringing upon another artist’s photograph of the rock star Prince. Mr. Warhol made a silk screened version of the photo, but the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that it did not constitute fair use.
Making a broader point about the breadth of its technology while also winking to the home turf of the Southern District, OpenAI referred to a web search for the Giants’ 1951 pennant (the team went on to lose to the New York Yankees in the World Series).
The lawsuit is being closely watched by legal scholars, news publishers and the world’s most powerful technology companies.
Most A.I. copyright lawsuits are still in their early phases, and none have gone to trial. Only a few have had rulings on crucial legal issues, according to a tracker founded by Ed Lee, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law.
The news organizations said it would be impossible for OpenAI and Microsoft to prove their products did not clearly harm the market for news. The Times argued that its business was harmed through substantially lower click-through rates to its articles when traditional search links to Times works were replaced with generative A.I. summaries in search results.
That substitution is crucial for proving that the A.I. systems do not sufficiently transform the works into new forms of expression, The Times and other media organizations said.
Citing expert witnesses, OpenAI argued that The Times’s and other plaintiffs’ businesses were not harmed because their web traffic was “not negatively impacted” by ChatGPT, its popular chatbot.
