Plaintiff, The New York Times Company complaint against Defendants Microsoft Corporation and OpenAI, Inc., alleges:
- Times journalists’ essential work is made possible through the efforts of a large and expensive organization that provides legal, security, and operational support, as well as editors who ensure their journalism meets the highest standards of accuracy and fairness.
- The Defendants’ unlawful use of Plaintiff’s copyrighted work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens Plaintiff’s ability to provide that service.
- The Constitution and the Copyright Act recognize the importance of giving creators exclusive rights over their works.
- Defendants have refused to recognize this protection.
- Defendants also use Microsoft’s Bing search index, which copies and categorizes The Times’s online content, to generate responses that contain verbatim excerpts and detailed summaries of Times articles that are significantly longer and more detailed than those returned by traditional search engines.
- Using the valuable intellectual property of others in these ways without paying for it has been highly lucrative for Defendants.
- The Times objected after discovering that Defendants were using Times content without permission to develop their models and tools.
- These negotiations have not led to a resolution.
- The law does not permit the systematic and competitive infringement that Defendants have committed.