Three House Democrats Ask Judge to Reject Justice Department's Stance in AI Copyright Cases
Three senior House Democrats have asked a federal judge in New York to reject the US Justice Department's arguments in copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft.
The congressmen are Jamie Raskin, Jerrold Nadler and Hank Johnson, the ranking members, or lead Democrats, on the House Judiciary Committee. Their filing is an amicus brief, a "friend of the court" document filed by someone who is not a party to the case, and it was dated 30 October. Nadler's office published a press release the same day. All three serve on the House subcommittee with jurisdiction over copyright policy.
The lawsuits are before Judge Sidney Stein in the Southern District of New York, the federal court covering Manhattan. News publishers and authors say that copying their work to train OpenAI's models was infringement, meaning an unauthorised use of material protected by copyright. Training is the process of feeding huge amounts of text into software so it learns patterns in language.
The Justice Department entered the case in September, filing a statement of interest. That is a document in which the government sets out its view of the law without joining either side. The Democrats say the department is urging the court to give AI companies unlimited, free use of copyrighted journalism from The New York Times to train their models.
Their central objection concerns fair use, the legal defence that allows some use of copyrighted work without permission or payment. The lawmakers argue that the department's version of fair use would ignore federal statutes and effectively give AI companies a blanket exemption from copyright law. Their brief opposes the department's fair-use analysis point by point.
Authors Alliance, a group that advocates for writers, filed its own amicus brief in the OpenAI litigation on 30 October. The group's filing joins dozens of other amicus briefs now on the court's docket.
The case has reached a stage where both sides have finished their written arguments. The next step is a ruling on summary judgment, a decision on whether the case can be settled on the written record without a full trial. Publishers Marketplace reported on 2 November that the briefing is complete. The judge has not yet ruled, and no date for a decision has been announced.
For publishers and authors, the outcome will decide whether the books, articles and essays they produce can be fed into AI systems without permission. For everyone else, it raises a plainer question about who gets paid when a writer's work becomes raw material for a machine.
