Microsoft Cites VCR Technology in Defense Against New York Times Copyright Lawsuit
Drawing Parallels Between AI and Historical Innovations
In a surprising legal strategy, Microsoft is invoking the legacy of the VCR to dismiss three claims in The New York Times’ copyright infringement lawsuit against the tech giant and OpenAI. The company’s lawyers argue that OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) are simply the latest in a series of technologies that, despite their potential for copyright abuse, have been deemed legal.
“Despite The Times’s contentions, copyright law is no more an obstacle to large language model than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, copy machine, personal computer, internet or search engine),” reads one passage.
The Times’ Response and Microsoft’s Counter-Arguments
Ian Crosby, lead counsel for the Times, points out that Microsoft did not dispute working with OpenAI to copy the publication’s stories. Instead, the company drew an unusual comparison between LLMs and VCRs, even though VCR makers never claimed that massive copyright infringement was necessary to develop their products.
Microsoft also challenged the Times’ allegation that it knowingly induced users’ copyright infringement through products using OpenAI’s GPT model, noting that the Times failed to provide an example of direct infringement by a Copilot user. The company argued that the Times’ contributory infringement theory fails on the same basis as the failed challenge to the VCR four decades ago.
DMCA Violation Claims and Generative AI Lawsuits
Microsoft further asserts that the Times did not prove a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by deliberately removing copyright management information from its training data. The company highlighted other generative AI lawsuits that used similar arguments and had those claims dismissed.
The outcome of lawsuits like the one brought by the Times against OpenAI and Microsoft could significantly impact the future growth of the generative AI industry. OpenAI has also filed a motion to dismiss, claiming that the Times “tricked” ChatGPT into directly reproducing copyrighted material from the publication.
2 Comments
Does Microsoft think it’s still the 90s or are they onto something with the VCR analogy
How ancient do you have to be to even remember what a VCR is, let alone use it in an argument