The U.S. government has recently submitted a key document to the court, publicly expressing support for OpenAI's position in its copyright dispute with publishers such as The New York Times. The U.S. Department of Justice clearly stated in the document that using news content to train artificial intelligence models fully complies with the "fair use" principle under U.S. copyright law.
Looking back at this highly anticipated legal case, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI as early as December 2023, accusing their ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot of using a large amount of the Times' copyrighted content without authorization to train models and generate related responses. The involvement of the U.S. government in this case undoubtedly introduces a major variable in its outcome.
In the document, the U.S. government provided a deep analysis from the perspectives of industry development and legal principles. The Department of Justice emphasized that if laws restrict AI companies from using copyrighted content to train large language models, it would directly contradict the fundamental legislative principles of copyright law and severely hinder innovation and scientific progress in the entire artificial intelligence field.
In terms of specific legal arguments, the U.S. government pointed out that the training process of an artificial intelligence model on original works is "highly transformative," and such usage does not harm the market value of the original copyrighted works. On the contrary, if the threshold for "fair use" rules is excessively tightened, it could lead to extreme monopolies in the industry, leaving only well-funded large technology companies capable of paying substantial copyright licensing fees, ultimately severely weakening the United States' core competitiveness in the global artificial intelligence industry.
With the official statement of the U.S. government's position, this copyright battle has reached a new critical stage. Relevant parties expect to submit new motions to the court, requesting the judge to make a final ruling on certain core issues in the case after completing the subsequent evidence exchange procedures.
