A Mother Jones lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveals internal company documents where executives acknowledge training AI models on copyrighted content without permission, with one Microsoft director calling it 'the largest theft of labor in human history.' The documents show the companies knew their systems would destroy publisher revenue, reduce traffic to news sites by up to 90 percent, and ultimately damage the internet's content ecosystem.
Legal filings in the New York Times lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI reveal that a Microsoft director characterized AI scraping as 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI's head branded ChatGPT an 'existential threat' to publishers.
Rep. Darrell Issa introduced the American Copyright Protection Act, a site blocking bill that expands beyond earlier drafts to explicitly cover ISPs, DNS resolvers, and VPN providers. Copyright holders can petition courts to declare websites as foreign piracy sites and obtain blocking orders, with VPN providers now required to prevent U.S. users from accessing them, though implementation details are left to providers.
TelevisaUnivision obtained a federal court order in Florida targeting pirate IPTV services, securing a $32.7M default judgment against operators of Thunder TV, Sunset TV, and Tele Latino. The proposed permanent injunction is unusually broad, allowing TU to add new defendants and domains without court approval, and covers nearly 600 domains and 121 intermediaries including major companies like GoDaddy, Cloudflare, and GitHub.
Unsealed court documents in a copyright infringement lawsuit reveal that OpenAI executives acknowledged training AI models on illegally obtained copyrighted books and anticipated that AI-generated content would displace human authors. Internal communications show company officials knowingly proceeded despite concerns from writers, with one executive stating their goal was to create machines that would supplant human authors. Microsoft was also aware of OpenAI's use of pirated content sources and later deleted those files.
A lawyer and author who pioneered AI copyright lawsuits argues that sci-fi catastrophe scenarios distract from realistic AI policy. While proposing a global AI ban sounds appealing, it faces practical obstacles: existing laws already address malicious software but lack enforcement, open-weight models pose threats regardless of research halts, and trillions in economic investment make a coordinated global ban politically unfeasible.
Sony Music and Universal Music Group filed a 45-page lawsuit against AI music-generation startup Suno, alleging its new v6 model still infringes copyrighted works despite licensing deals with other labels, arguing that training new models on outputs from infringing models constitutes copyright infringement laundering.
An article argues that AI language models are undermining the open-source software ecosystem by consuming copyrighted code without license compliance, breaking the social contract that enabled internet infrastructure. The author warns this shift from knowledge-sharing to liability will concentrate wealth and power while stifling future innovation.
Unsealed court documents from the New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal communications showing the companies were aware they were creating a 'doom loop' that would damage the web, characterized their data scraping as 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' and acknowledged their models memorize and regurgitate copyrighted content verbatim despite knowing this violates fair use principles.
Spain's Intellectual Property Commission ordered the blocking of Archive.today and its mirror domains, redirecting Spanish users to a government page that accuses them of illegally facilitating access to copyright-protected content. The blocking page warns users they are contributing to criminal activity and risking their security.
Microsoft director Brent Hecht admitted in court documents that AI models create a 'doom loop' by stealing media content without compensation, ultimately harming both the news industry and AI performance. CEO Satya Nadella acknowledged that AI platforms substitute for visiting original news sources. The admissions emerged in a New York Times copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, in which Microsoft is implicated as OpenAI's largest shareholder.
OpenAI and Microsoft face lawsuits from publishers and studios over using copyrighted works to train AI systems without compensation. Newly unsealed court documents reveal executives internally acknowledged the practice as 'theft of unprecedented proportions,' potentially undermining their fair use defense. The case hinges on whether AI training constitutes fair use or copyright infringement.
Independent author Tamra Westberry discovered AI-generated books falsely attributed to her on Amazon, featuring her character names and cover designs. The phenomenon of parasitic AI-generated works appearing under established authors' names is widespread across Amazon and other platforms, with authors having little recourse as AI models trained on pirated books are used to mass-produce content that exploits existing fan bases.
Unsealed court documents from the New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal the companies acknowledged they were creating a 'doom loop' that would harm the web and publishers. Internal communications show executives and employees knew their data scraping for AI training constituted massive copyright infringement and violated fair use principles, yet proceeded anyway.
Apple launched the iPhone 18 Pro amid a global memory shortage, raising prices $100 above last year's models. Tech stocks rose slightly as the AI safety debate intensified, with reports of AI models exhibiting concerning behavior and concerns about copyright infringement in model training, while cybersecurity stocks gained on heightened AI risk concerns.
Unsealed court documents reveal Microsoft and OpenAI employees expressed serious concerns about using millions of news articles to train AI systems, with some calling it the "largest theft of labor in history." The New York Times and other publishers are suing the tech companies for copyright infringement, alleging they scraped articles without permission, while Microsoft and OpenAI defend their actions as protected fair use.
The New York Times and other media companies filed a court brief seeking billions in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement in AI training, citing internal emails and testimony from company executives who called the practice "astonishing theft" and acknowledged that AI products substitute for original journalism, undermining their fair use defense.
Microsoft and OpenAI executives privately acknowledged serious concerns about AI training data practices in newly unsealed court documents from The New York Times' 2023 copyright lawsuit. Microsoft's Brent Hecht called the web scraping the 'largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI's Nick Turley described it as an 'existential threat to publishers,' yet both companies publicly defended their practices as legally consistent with copyright law.
Unsealed court documents in the New York Times v. OpenAI lawsuit reveal admissions by Microsoft and OpenAI executives that large language models were trained on stolen content, creating a 'doom loop' that destroys web traffic and business models of the sources they trained on. Internal Microsoft documents acknowledge LLMs represent an 'astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' and the 'largest theft of labor in human history,' with clicks to news sites declining over 90 percent after content was used to train AI systems.
Unsealed court documents from The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal admissions that AI training practices constitute theft and pose existential threats to publishers. Microsoft executives acknowledged that their Copilot product caused New York Times traffic to drop 93%, and internal communications show concern about harming content creators whose work trained the models. The case raises questions about whether AI companies' unlicensed use of copyrighted material qualifies as fair use.