Legal experts offer mixed opinions about how earlier copyright and fair use cases could affect The New York Times' case against OpenAI and Microsoft
Nice Try Kate Downing / Law Offices of Kate Downing : The New York Times Launches a Very Strong Case Against Microsoft and OpenAI Blake Brittain / Reuters : Microsoft, OpenAI hit with new lawsuit by authors over AI training Mariella Moon / Engadget : More non-fiction authors are suing OpenAI and Microsoft Mehrotra A / Neowin : Authors sue Microsoft and OpenAI alleging copyright infringement over AI training models Emily Price / PCMag : More Authors Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over ChatGPT Concerns Colton Stradling / Windows Central : Intellectual property theft? Non-fiction authors sue Microsoft and OpenAI in class action lawsuit mirroring New York Times case Matthias Bastian / The Decoder : OpenAI claims New York Times' prompting strategy violates its terms of service Amaka Nwaokocha / Cointelegraph : OpenAI faces fresh copyright lawsuit a week after NYT suit Pranav Dixit / Business Today : Microsoft, OpenAI, Google facing data scraping and copyright violation lawsuits for AI training Rupam Roy / CoinGape : OpenAI & Microsoft Face Another Lawsuit Amid NYT Woes Over AI Training Brenda Kanana / Cryptopolitan : The Age of AI Legal Battle Unfolds Dan Mangan / NBC News : Microsoft and OpenAI sued for copyright infringement by nonfiction book authors in class action claim International Business Times : Authors sue Microsoft, OpenAI for copyright infringement in new lawsuit PYMNTS.com : ChatGPT Got ‘Lazier’ Before NYT Lawsuit: What It Means for Enterprise AI Threads: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Whether training an AI on copyrighted works is fair use is the quintessential AI question. Precedent is on the side of AI companies give the Google Books ruling which said it's legal to scan books for book search without permission from the copyright holders. … Will Oremus / @willoremus : Artists, authors, creators, the NYT et al are suing AI firms for copyright infringement. The suits could shake the foundations of the AI boom and rebalance power between humans and machines. But will they actually win? That will hinge on how courts interpret “fair use” for the AI age. … Mastodon: Matt Hodges / @MattHodges@mastodon.social : “Judges so far have been wary of the argument that training an AI model on copyrighted works — the ‘input’ side — amounts to a violation in itself [...] 'I'm going to take the position, based on precedent, that if the outputs aren't infringing, then anything that took place before isn't infringing as well,' Goldman said. … Will Oremus / @willoremus@mastodon.social : Copyright law could be AI's achilles heel. But what will it take for the NYT and other plaintiffs to actually win their cases? — We talked to half a dozen IP and tech law experts about the thorny legal doctrine at the heart of the cases — fair use — and how courts might apply it to AI. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... X: @newsalliance : “It's not learning the facts like a brain would learn facts,” said Danielle Coffey, CEO of @newsalliance. “It's literally spitting the words back out at you.'” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @washingtonpost : A lawsuit the New York Times filed against OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court last week has the potential to rattle the foundations of the booming generative AI industry, some legal experts say — but they could also fall flat. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The New York Times’ copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft turned a broader dispute over training data into a consequential test of fair use for news publishers and AI developers.
The legal debate is sharpened by the Google Books precedent: experts disagree over whether AI training is sufficiently transformative or whether alleged model outputs make the comparison less favorable to the companies.
First-order effects
- OpenAI and Microsoft gain a recognizable fair-use defense framework, while the Times can focus its case on alleged copying, substitution, and outputs that reproduce protected material.
- The split expert view leaves the parties without a clear early signal on liability, increasing the importance of factual evidence about training and model behavior.
Second-order effects
- Related author lawsuits can draw on the Times case’s arguments, while AI companies face pressure to make fair-use defenses consistent across text, image, and other training-data disputes.
- Publishers and other rightsholders gain leverage to pursue licensing discussions even before courts establish a definitive rule for AI training.
Third-order effects
- If courts distinguish AI training from earlier search-and-indexing cases, access to high-quality copyrighted data could become a more explicitly negotiated input to model development.
- The litigation points toward a durable divide between models built on broad web-scale collection and models backed by licensing or other rights-clearance arrangements, though fair-use rulings will determine how sharp that divide becomes.
The trend: Generative AI is forcing copyright law to decide whether ingesting protected works for model training resembles transformative indexing or a new form of commercial content use.