6 ms·
The New York Times Has Spent $10.8M in Its Legal Battle with OpenAI So Far
- rustc 2y agoI hope they don't settle early and we finally get an answer to whether training AI on copyrighted content is fair use or not.
- seydor 2y agoat this point we won't need to know because most AIs will be trained on generated data
- tester756 2y agoWhy is it THAT expensive?
- tintor 2y agoLawyer time $10.8 ~ 135 days * 8 hours * $1000/h x10
- tester756 2y ago1000/h? why they're this expensive?
- hlynurd 2y agoBecause people are willing to pay that amount
- echoangle 2y agoBecause the times is trying to get millions or billions in compensation if they win, why would you lower your odds of winning by getting cheaper lawyers just to save a few 100 k?
- jfkrrorj 2y agoThat is pretty cheap for NYC lawyer.
- songshu 2y agoThey have, let’s not call it a union to not upset people, but let’s say a collective agreement that they won’t work for capital. They will only work for other lawyers. So there’s no Walmart Law or other enterprise selling legal services for cheap.
- samvher 2y agoI'm trying to parse the idea of "a collective agreement" but can't fully wrap my head around how that would work. It seems to me more like the lack of a "Walmart Law" is a result of e.g. lack of economies of scale and other economic structure, rather than some collective agreement. (If it was profitable to break out of that agreement and start a "Walmart Law", it seems we'd see that happen pretty quickly?) But if you know more about this and I'm off the mark I'd love to learn
- songshu 2y agoI looked it up. Rule 5.4 of the American Bar Association.
- echoangle 2y agohttps://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibility/publications/model_rules_of_professional_conduct/rule_5_4_professional_independence_of_a_lawyer/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
- HDThoreaun 2y agoEvery fortune 500 company has a team of lawyers working for it.
- jcranmer 2y agoThey're not. Median lawyer rates are more like $200-300/h, with variations depending on locality--a lawyer in NYC is going to be much more expensive than a lawyer in middle-of-nowhere, Kentucky. As for why they're expensive, part of the answer is because legal training (i.e., law school) is expensive, and lawyers have to pay their student debt.
- nyssos 2y agoLawyer rates are extremely high variance, and the NYT is not hiring anywhere near the median. White shoe firms break $1000/hr routinely.
- tptacek 2y agoMy understanding of the price/scarcity dynamics here are that people want lawyers with significant experience, there are a relatively small number of openings every year for BigLaw associates that provide access to that kind of experience, and they hire almost exclusively from the T14 schools. If you want a random lawyer, you can get them very cheap. But if you're doing M&A or serious corp litigation, you're looking at a much smaller and more expensive pool of candidates. I was shocked by how much our M&A lawyers cost. All this is to say: the median might not be telling most of the story here.
- seydor 2y agoan AI lawyer could work 24/365
- screye 2y agoI can't imagine a scenario where pre-training on someone else's works is fair-use, but distilling from a proprietary LLM isn't.
- ViktorRay 2y agoWould anyone here be able to explain to me where this money is going? Are the lawyers working for the New York Times really this expensive? If so these lawyers must be getting massive amounts of money...
- echoangle 2y agoIs 10 million a year a lot for lawyers? I thought a partner at a large law firm might get $ 500k or more per year, so paying a few lawyers and the assistants for all of them can get expensive quickly.
- nyssos 2y ago> I thought a partner at a large law firm might get $ 500k or more per year Easily.
- light_triad 2y ago$1000-$2000+/h is not uncommon for top lawyers
- lesuorac 2y agoI still find it very (depressingly) hilarious how everybody sees this as a lawsuit about if training on copyrighted context is legal or not. Literally, the NYT claimed that OpenAI maintained a database of NYT's works and would just verbatim surface the content. This is not an AI issue, it's settled copyright law.
- Maxatar 2y agoNYT's statement of claims is here: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20... And OpenAI's defense is here: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrkxbmgpe/OPENAI%20MICROSOFT%20NEW%20YORK%20TIMES%20mtd.pdf https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrkxbmgpe/... OpenAI's defense, which I am not in a position to verify, is that ChatGPT can not be used to reproduce NYT's articles verbatim without a great deal of prompt engineering. That the submissions NYT provided of verbatim reproductions are the result of a third party expert who tried more than 10000 prompts that included feeding into ChatGPT portions of NYT articles in order to get ChatGPT to respond with verbatim reproductions of NYT articles and that no one uses ChatGPT in this manner. Furthermore the verbatim reproductions that ChatGPT did end up producing after these 10000 prompts are available on numerous public websites unaffiliated with NYT.
- hiatus 2y ago> and that no one uses ChatGPT in this manner Someone did though and was able to get verbatim reproductions of NYT articles out of it. > Furthermore the verbatim reproductions that ChatGPT did end up producing after these 10000 prompts are available on numerous public websites unaffiliated with NYT. So what? NYT as a copyright holder might have no issue with those unaffiliated sites but have an issue with OpenAI.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoThis is a problem with copyright law. There is no way for an end user to determine the copyright status of anything on the Internet, you can only make an educated guess.
- pkamb 2y agoIs anyone building a public domain repository / AI training ground for old newspapers? Anything before 1930 has no restrictions. Newspapers.com has pretty good content but the interface and search is extremely lacking. Google News was abandoned a decade ago. This seems like something where AI could really help, for once. Not in training chatbots or whatever but actually just providing great search for articles in books, newspapers, and magazines.
- themarbz 2y agoI'm imagining a model trained on pre-1930 data that only speaks "old-timey English"...
- tombert 2y agoI think that idea is capital. I'm really hoping that chatbots starting using 23-skidoo in conversations.
- adonovan 2y ago> How do I make an HTML view of a SQL database? Well old chap, you'll need a shoeshine box full of vacuum tubes and some brass flanges...
- TomatoCo 2y agoI'm imagining a text-to-speech model that only speaks in the Transatlantic Accent
- bikeshaving 2y agoThere’s also a fascinating proposal I read somewhere where you create a training set with a knowledge cutoff of 1900 or 1930 and see if the resulting AI could predict the future or independently discover later scientific breakthroughs.
- mrweasel 2y agoThe interface and search could probably be solved without the use of AI. Seems like mostly an OCR problem. Both ElasticSearch and Sphinx are already really good, and I'm sure that there are other open source or commercial search engines available, or hire ex-Google engineers, Google doesn't seem interested in search anymore.
- n0rdy 2y agoI like following the OpenAI vs. NYT case, as it's a great example of the controversial situation: - OpenAI created their models by parsing the internet by disregarding the copyrights, licenses, etc., or looking for a law loopholes - by doing that, OpenAI (alongside others) developed a new progressive tool that is shaping the world, and seems to be the next “internet”-like (impact-wise) thing - NYT is not happy about that, as their content is their main asset - less democratic countries, can apply even less ethical practices for data mining, as the copyright laws don't work there, so one might claim that it's a question of national defense, considering the fact that AI is actively used in the miltech these days - while the ethical part is less controversial (imho, as I'm with NYT there), the legal one is more complicated: the laws might simply say nothing about this use case (think GPL vs. AGPL license), so the world might need new ones. And so on...
- user3939382 2y agoMy ideal solution would be to public domain anything NYT has written in the past, turn it over to archive.org, and dismantle NYT so it’s no longer an issue in the future.
- gotoeleven 2y agoAre they paying the lawyers with government money? I'm seriously asking. Why is the government paying 10s of millions of dollars/year to the New York Times? How can they still claim to be a news organization without having disclosed this? If the government is paying the NYT, then don't their productions belong in the public domain? https://x.com/stillgray/status/1887191056074350690 https://x.com/stillgray/status/1887191056074350690
- delecti 2y agoThat suggestion seems rather conspiratorial. Do you have any reason to think that's the case, or are you just throwing it out as a wild possibility? Also, has anything changed WRT Ian Miles Cheong's credibility? He's been a far-right grifter for years, I wouldn't trust any data he puts out without a corroborating source.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago(1) Apparently (2) Why don't you ask the NYT or the departments in question (eg through a FOI request)? (3) The NYT sells things, also to the government, so what? Why should they disclose this? (4) No, not by default. Depends on the circumstances. You make insinuations without a shred of relevant evidence. Your tinfoil hat is on too tight.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y agoIf you're wondering what this nonsense is about, it's a conspiracy theory straight from Trump's mouth: false claims that Democrats paid for positive coverage. The truth? Subscriptions. What a surprise. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/business/trump-politico-usaid-spending-conspiracy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/business/trump-politico-u...
- nimish 2y agoNYT will lose: Copyright only protects the actual text. LLMs have weights, not exact copies. In any case, saying "if I put in some input and get copyrighted output" is tantamount to copyright violations; if I use a generative tool and generate copyrighted info is it the tools fault? An LLM is a dump of effectively arbitrary numbers that, when hooked up to a command line, uses one of the world's most awful programming languages to evaluate and execute. OpenAI at most broke an EULA or some technicality on copyright w.r.t. local ephemeral copies. What's the damage to the NYT though?
- otterley 2y agoTo train the model, OpenAI had to make a copy of NYT's works in order to do it. (Running a scraper to dump websites onto your local storage is making a copy.) NYT's first theory is that the act of copying is a prima facie copyright violation.
- kopecs 2y ago> Copyright only protects the actual text. LLMs have weights, not exact copies. Following this logic a lossily compressed image is completely unprotected by copyright. > In any case, saying "if I put in some input and get copyrighted output" is tantamount to copyright violations; if I use a generative tool and generate copyrighted info is it the tools fault? Do you not think this is obviously fact-specific? If I gzip a bunch of (copyrighted) files, then obviously that doesn't somehow make distributing them not infringement. If I now replace the tool = ungzip + input = files combination with tool = (ungzip and files) and input = (selection mechanism over files) do you think that in the second case distributing the tool is not infringement? I don't mean to say that any of these is precisely the same as the LLM case, but I think your argument is clearly overbroad. > OpenAI at most broke an EULA or some technicality on copyright w.r.t. local ephemeral copies. What's the damage to the NYT though? One obvious damage claim (if you are skeptical of market harm wrt newspaper/oneline sub sales) is that they were entitled to the FMV of licensing costs of the articles, which is not so hard to value: OpenAI has entered such agreements with AP and others. [0] [0]: https://apnews.com/article/openai-chatgpt-associated-press-ap-f86f84c5bcc2f3b98074b38521f5f75a https://apnews.com/article/openai-chatgpt-associated-press-a...
- 2y ago
- SebFender 2y ago"OpenAI asserts that training AI models using publicly accessible content, including material from The New York Times, is protected under longstanding fair use principles." Incredible. The foundation of fair use is a transformative and non-consumptive use of copyrighted material.