U.S. Justice Department supports fair use defense in New York Times AI case

The US Department of Justice has urged a federal court to treat the use of copyrighted text for training large language models as fair use, siding with OpenAI and Microsoft in their dispute with The New York Times.

In a letter filed in the consolidated copyright case in Manhattan, the government argues that AI training should be assessed separately from a model’s outputs. It says developers may copy complete works during training, but the material is not made public in that process. The resulting outputs also often do not substantially resemble the original works, according to the filing.

The Justice Department says The New York Times presents an overly broad theory of market harm by treating model training and potentially infringing outputs as the same use. It warns that a sweeping rule against training on copyrighted material could limit scientific research, creative work, and US competitiveness in AI.

To make its point, the government refers to writer Joan Didion, who reportedly typed out Ernest Hemingway’s stories as a teenager to study his style. The filing argues that copyright law should not require a person to pay an author whenever learning from a work later informs a new creation.

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging that the companies used millions of its articles without permission to train models including GPT-4. The newspaper has sought damages and the destruction of models trained on its content.

Rights holders reject the government’s position. A Times spokesperson told WIRED that AI companies should pay for the material that makes their products possible. The Authors Guild called the letter a misunderstanding of fair use law.

The intervention also conflicts with a recent US Copyright Office report, which cautioned that commercial AI systems can operate at a scale far beyond human learning and may compete with creators in established markets. The Justice Department says that report has no binding legal force and that fair use must be decided case by case.

Sources

• US Department of Justice backs fair use for AI training in landmark copyright case – The Decoder
• Trump Administration Sides With OpenAI in New York Times Copyright Lawsuit – WIRED