Court Filings in A.I. Suit Invoke Copyright Law, Culture and Sports; The New York Times, September 4, 2026

 Mike Isaac and Karen Weise , The New York Times; Court Filings in A.I. Suit Invoke Copyright Law, Culture and Sports

Filings made Friday in The New York Times’s closely watched lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft included a range of copyright law and cultural references.

"Court filings made Friday in a closely watched copyright trial pitting The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft invoked a wide range of material, including relevant copyright law, arts and sports.

The suit, filed in 2023 by The Times and joined by a group of other news outlets, claims that OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence start-up, and its partner Microsoft infringed on the publishers’ copyrighted material by using millions of their articles to train A.I. technologies. A.I. companies now compete with The Times as a source of information, the news outlet argued in its suit.

The briefs, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, largely boiled down to two questions: whether the publishers’ news articles were sufficiently “transformed” into an entirely new work by A.I., and whether A.I. produced content that “substituted” for news articles and harmed their value.

Friday was the last day the companies could file motions for a summary judgment that would head off a trial. Judge Sidney H. Stein is expected to make a ruling in the coming weeks."

OpenAI copyright case reveals 'ease with which generative AI can devastate the market', says PA; The Bookseller, November 12, 2025

 MATILDA BATTERSBY , The Bookseller; OpenAI copyright case reveals 'ease with which generative AI can devastate the market', says PA

"A judge’s ruling that legal action by authors against OpenAI for copyright infringement can go ahead reveals “the ease with which generative AI can devastate the market”, according to the Publishers Association (PA).

Last week, a federal judge in the US refused OpenAI’s attempts to dismiss claims by authors that text summaries of published works by ChatGPT (which is owned by OpenAI) infringes their copyrights.

The lawsuit, which is being heard in New York, brings together cases from a number of authors, as well as the Authors Guild, filed in various courts.

In his ruling, which upheld the authors’ right to attempt to sue OpenAI, District Judge Sidney Stein compared George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones to summaries of the novel created by ChatGPT.

Judge Stein said: “[A] discerning observer could easily conclude that this detailed summary is substantially similar to Martin’s original work because the summary conveys the overall tone and feel of the original work by parroting the plot, characters and themes of the original.”

The class action consolidates 12 complaints being brought against OpenAI and Microsoft. It argues copyrighted books were reproduced to train OpenAI’s artificial intelligence large language models (LLM) and, crucially, that LLMs, including ChatGPT, can infringe copyright via their output, ie the text produced when asked a question.

This landmark legal case is the first to examine whether the output of an AI chatbot infringes copyright, rather than looking at whether the training of the model was an infringement."

OpenAI Copyright Suit Consolidation Portends Consistency, Risk; Bloomberg Law, April 8, 2025

 

Annelise Levy

, Kyle Jahner , Bloomberg Law; OpenAI Copyright Suit Consolidation Portends Consistency, Risk

"OpenAI Inc.'s tactical win consolidating a dozen copyright suits against it nevertheless carries risks for the company, as the matters proceed before a judge who’s already ruled against the company in key decisions.

The US Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation last week centralized casesacross the country in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York for pretrial activity, which could include dispositive motions including summary judgment, as well as contentious discovery disputes that have been common among the cases.

“This will help create more consistency in the pre-trial outcomes, but it also means that you’ll get fewer tries from different plaintiffs to find a winning set of arguments,” Peter Henderson, an assistant professor at Princeton University, said in an email...

While streamlined, the pretrial proceedings figure to remain contentious as the parties press novel questions about how copyright laws apply to the game-changing generative AI technology. The disputes carry vast ramifications for companies reliant on millions of copyrighted works to train their models."