Microsoft on Monday filed a motion in federal court seeking to dismiss portions of the lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company.
On December 27, the newspaper sued Microsoft and its partner OpenAI, accusing them of infringing copyright by using the article to train AI technologies such as the online chatbot ChatGPT. Chatbots compete with news organizations as trusted sources of information, the lawsuit says.
In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Microsoft says that large language models (LLMs), the technology that powers chatbots, cannot replace the market for trained news articles and other materials. He claimed that there was no.
The tech giant compared LLM to videocassette recorders and claimed that both are allowed by law. “Despite the Times' assertions, copyright law is no more a barrier to LLMs than it is to VCRs (or player pianos, photocopiers, personal computers, the Internet, or search engines),” the motion reads. There is.
In the late 1970s, movie studios sued Sony over the Betamax VCR, claiming it allowed illegal copying of movies and TV shows. However, the court ultimately held that making these copies for personal viewing was fair use under the law.
Microsoft's motion was similar to one issued by OpenAI last week. Microsoft said three parts of the lawsuit should be dismissed, in part because the Times failed to show actual harm.
For example, the paper claims that if a reader uses a Microsoft chatbot to look up recommendations from Wirecutter, a review site it owns, it will lose revenue from users who would have clicked on the referral link. Ta. Microsoft argued in the Times lawsuit that “there are no real-world facts suggesting any meaningful misappropriation of proceeds from Wirecutter.”
Microsoft and The New York Times Company had no immediate comment.
The Times became the first major American media company to sue Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright issues related to its own works. Authors, computer coders, and other groups have also filed copyright lawsuits against companies that build generative AI, the technology that generates text, images, and other media.
Like other AI companies, Microsoft and OpenAI built their technology by feeding vast amounts of digital data that may be protected by copyright. The AI companies argued that such material was publicly available and could be used to legally train systems without paying a fee because they did not reproduce the material in its entirety.
In its lawsuit, the Times included an example of its OpenAI technology reproducing excerpts from articles almost word for word. Microsoft said that because chatbots are a “transformative” technology that uses copyrighted material to create something new, the technology training for such articles is a “fair use” under the law. But he did not dismiss arguments against “fair use” and said he would address these issues later.