A federal judge has upheld a ruling directing OpenAI to preserve logs and data slated for deletion after news outlets including the Chicago Tribune suing the technology giant accused the company of hiding evidence of copyright infringement.
The new ruling, issued Thursday in Manhattan Federal Court, denied the company’s objection to an earlier court order directing OpenAI to keep any data used to train its artificial intelligence bots — logs which plaintiffs say may contain details of widespread content piracy.
OpenAI executives have maintained that they are merely safeguarding users’ privacy by objecting to any data retention request or order.
But lawyers for the plaintiffs said the privacy argument is nothing more than a distraction.
“This is like a magician trying to misdirect the public’s attention,” said Steven Lieberman, a lawyer representing the News and several other media outlets.
“That is absolutely false. The judge has made clear and plaintiffs have made clear that they don’t want to receive information that personally identifies the users of these conversations. If data is turned over, it will only be turned over anonymously. And OpenAI knows that. No one’s privacy it’s at risk.”
The publishers’ key argument at the core of their lawsuit is that the data that powers the company’s popular ChatGPT has included millions of copyrighted works from the news organizations.
The publications have argued that such content has been used without consent or payment — which translates to copyright infringement on a massive scale.
Various reports have placed the company’s value at $300 billion, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world, thanks in part to its online chatbox, ChatGPT, which was released in 2022.
But when it comes to raw material — redistributed creative content — OpenAI took the cheap and easy way out, Lieberman said.
“They just stole it from the newspapers, from magazines and from book authors,” he said.
A representative from OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
OpenAI has argued that the vast amount of data used to train its artificial intelligence bots is protected by “fair use” rules. The doctrine applies to rules that allow some to use copyrighted work for purposes like criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching and research.
However, lawyers for the newspapers have argued that the fair use test involves transforming a copyrighted work into something new, and the new work cannot compete with the original in the same marketplace.
The court has rejected OpenAI’s position that the newspapers haven’t produced “a shred of evidence” that people are using ChatGPT or OpenAI’s API products to get news instead of paying for it.
The New York Times originally brought the suit in December 2023. The Tribune, along with other newspapers in affiliated companies MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, filed in April 2024.
The other outlets included The New York Daily News, The Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel.
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