> The New York Times’ lawsuit, meanwhile, asks everyone to ignore a half century of legal history and progress, and toss aside the longstanding principle of fair use in their own narrow pursuit of an undeserved payday.
The New York Times lawsuit isn't purely about training on content - it's about memorization. They included examples of OpenAI's models being able to reproduce NYT articles entirely from the weights.
There's also stuff about RAG in there - about OpenAI (and Microsoft) features that run web searches and then summarize the results. I've not been following developments closely, I'd be interested to know how that part of the lawsuit is shaking out so far.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/search-results?prod_search-inde... (copyright, last 12 months)
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/search-results?prod_search-inde... (OAI, last 12 months)
To demonstrate this "what you do next matters" part, assume I get a book from the library and I read it, and I have perfect memory. So far, no problem, even with my fantastical memory. However what I do next matters:
A. I quote several short pieces of the book in a written critique. Fair use.
B. I use what I know to create a statistical breakdown of the author's favorite words and phrases. That's fine too.
C. I retype my own book which is 90% identical to the original and I publish it for money. Nuh-uh. Legal problems abound.
We can debate whether or not these companies are crossing the line, but the line does depend on what they do with the information, not just how they got it.
Consider a random example of fair use: print an excerpt of this three panel comic you would like to discuss.
Does building a business around the automation of fair use constitute fair use? I would say no.
This seems like an excellent and very clear distinction. Once it becomes a wholesale harvesting and processing for financial gain, it stops being fair use. Fair use clearly has a magnitude component.
If an LLM trains on NYT articles is the output of the model a substitute for the original article? Or will people continue to pay for the New York Times as before?
Whether they build a business around it doesn't really matter. Plenty of large businesses depend on fair use to avoid copyright lawsuits, including any tech company that hosts any kind of content (YouTube, Reddit, Meta). Even the media itself relies on fair use to be able to air any content.
And also, training an open weights AI on the outputs of an AI trained using "fair use", is itself "fair use" that benefits everyone.
I don't think scooping all of the internet and saying rules for thee but not for me is the way to go.
1. I sneak into a movie theater without paying. Unauthorized access to the movie.
2. I write a review of the movie in the newspaper. Protected by fair-use, even if I sneaked into the theater.
But asking the trained model lots of questions, and creating a similar but different open weights model? No, that's fair use.
The current copyright rules cover both cases well and benefit everyone, I think. (I think copyrights are waaay too long, but that's another topic....) Whether trillion dollar companies can ever make a profit once open weights competitors distill them is, frankly, not our concern.
He literally made billions exploiting the intellectual work of millions of his fellow humans, yet has the audacity to whine about how the system isn't fair.
There's absolutely no "fair use" precedent that says that you can program a computer with copyrighted material. They're just asking for an exception essentially based on their compression being lossy, which of course the law takes the absolute opposite opinion on e.g. distributing a 1080p of my bluray disc has been determined to definitely not be fair use.
Their essential case is that they use the word "training," and people training themselves from books is fair use, so since they use the word "training" then what they're doing is fair use. It's stupid, and judges going for it are either stupid or corrupt. I'm not actually copying your book, I'm training my printing press.
Delaware Park, one of those three casinos, put up a billboard opposing the bill, and it said, "No more casinos! THREE IS ENOUGH!"
It just goes to show that corporations will take any position -- even a casino taking an anti-casino position -- as long as it's self-serving.
If you're using the collective output of humanity to train your LLM then humanity should own the output. Problem solved.
One can easily understand this as the worker's relationship to the means of production.
What OpenAI wants is "free use".
Copyright originally maxed out at 28 years. Corporations rewrote the laws over and over, so that now copyright can last over 100 years, turning intellectual property into yet another rent extraction scheme.
Now, in this case, OpenAI argues that “fair use” is for the good of all. OpenAI doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for all. They want the ability to define intellectual property rules so that they can extract rent from someone else’s property.
If they want to benefit everyone, why aren’t their models open? For that matter, why is their name OpenAI, when they are not open? They’re publishing tons of work in mathematics, supposedly to benefit everyone. Instead, why don’t they forgo all research themselves and dedicate their work to supporting existing mathematicians in using AI effectively, so that the people that built the base of knowledge get credit for the new work?
Because OpenAI wants to extract the maximum shareholder value out of other people’s work.
Does anyone actually believe PR like this anymore?
They must understand that this can literally only make people hate them more.
Just be honest and don't try to blend it into "Everyone".
But seriously, fair use is for students, teachers, comedians, and all the people who can't pay or couldn't possibly pay enough for permission from copyright holders. A corporation training a closed model for profit can, and should, pay. If American copyright law is too onerous for megacorps to contend with, maybe it should be reformed.
paaloeye•1h ago
Have you heard of the landmark $1.5 billion class-action copyright settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic?
Absolute cinema!
simonw•1h ago
I have some notes about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/24/anthropic-training/
paaloeye•1h ago
paaloeye•51m ago
First line in your notes.
simonw•36m ago
And it supports my summary here. Anthropic did "win" on the fair use issue, but lost on the pirating.
Note that I said "The Bartz v. Anthropic settlement wasn't about fair use" - and that's accurate, the settlement aka the $1.5bn was about the pirated books, even though the initial lawsuit was about fair use.
Here's my later post about that settlement: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/anthropic-settlement/