The New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp., et al.

Copyright
Written By Michael Eshaghian

Overview

Filed December 27, 2023 in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Summary: The New York Times filed suit against Open AI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, vicarious and contributory copyright infringement, violations of the DMCA, common law unfair competition, and trademark dilution. It alleges that the defendants unlawfully copied The Times’ content via their generative AI products like ChatGPT and Copilot. These generative AIs rely on large-language models (LLMs) that, The Times alleges, were built by copying millions of its copyrighted articles.

Status: On April 1, 2024, the judge denied a motion to intervene filed by plaintiffs from a related litigation against Microsoft. The related litigation is a class action comprising book authors and playwrights who claim that OpenAI infringed their copyrights. Separately, OpenAI and Microsoft moved to dismiss the complaint. The Court granted The NYT’s motion to file an amended complaint on August 6, 2024, which it did on August 12. In response to defendants’ motion to dismiss, the court, on March 26, 2025, ruled (i) all the copyright infringement claims survive, (ii) the unfair competition claim should be dismissed with prejudice, and (iii) most of the DMCA claims should be dismissed without prejudice.

Bottom Line: This is yet another intellectual property lawsuit against generative AI companies. The Times attached compelling evidence of copying to its complaint where the AI spit out almost verbatim copies of The Times’ copyrighted articles. Like the other lawsuits, the main defense for OpenAI and Microsoft may be that their use of The Times’ content was protected by fair use.

 
Michael Eshaghian
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