USA Today and 20 Publishers Sue OpenAI for Over $250 Million

A group of 20 publishers led by USA Today Co has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI in a Manhattan federal court. The media companies demand more than $250 million in damages alongside an injunction barring the AI lab from continuing to use their copyrighted material.

According to the complaint, OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of published articles without permission to train language models behind ChatGPT. The publishers argue that reporting original news constitutes protected intellectual property, regardless of whether the articles appear openly online.

Central to the clash is whether ingesting journalistic archives qualifies under the US copyright doctrine of fair use. While tech firms routinely defend large-scale data harvesting under transformative use exceptions, publishers contend that building competing commercial tools on their uncompensated work goes far beyond any fair use defense. The plaintiffs also argue that comprehensive AI answers directly undermine their business model by stripping away reader traffic.

The filing follows similar actions in the same Manhattan court, including claims by The New York Times and smaller outlets such as Emmerich Newspapers against OpenAI and Microsoft. A ruling against OpenAI could force AI developers into mandatory licensing deals and force sweeping changes to how datasets are harvested.

Source: habr

Secondary source: The Economic Times