- The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) has sued Microsoft and OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement practices.
- The case comes as OpenAI has reached a significant deal with Time magazine to access its articles for its AI model.
The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), one of the US’s oldest non-profit news organizations, has sued Microsoft and OpenAI in a federal court over allegations of copyright infringement, including copying, using, displaying, and abridging CIR content without permission or compensation. The case follows similar lawsuits by publishers such as the New York Daily News, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, the chatbot has reportedly used web scraping techniques to create copy, often derived from news stories on the internet. However, AI companies frequently carry out such practices without any effort to gain permission or provide compensation to make their chatbot more powerful. The CIR has stated that it seeks at least $750 per instance of infringed work and a minimum of $2,500 per DMCA violation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
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The New York Times was the first to sue Microsoft and OpenAI in December 2023 for violating intellectual property laws. In April 2024, the Chicago Tribune and seven other newspapers also filed a similar lawsuit. Prominent authors have sued the AI startup for using their work to train ChatGPT.
On the other hand, OpenAI has been gradually entering deals with other publishers, including Reddit, Time magazine, and News Corp, to use current and archived content to create responses to user queries and train upcoming AI models. How OpenAI and Microsoft handle content creators’ objections while balancing them with the needs of AI and revenue models remains to be seen.