In a heavily redacted court filing Thursday, The New York Times proposed to amend its copyright complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft to clarify a claim and allege that Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal NYT works by building a bespoke supercomputing system ranked among the most powerful in the world.
NYT’s motion comes after the Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony tried and failed to claim that Cox was contributing to music piracy as an Internet service provider, which set a new standard for contributory infringement. Moving forward, plaintiffs will have to prove that parties intentionally acted to induce illegal conduct. Recognizing that the legal precedent has changed, the NYT now wants to amend its complaint to align its contributory infringement claim against Microsoft with that new standard.
“Today, we asked the court for permission to file an amended complaint that further strengthens our case, clarifying our claim of contributory infringement against Microsoft based on new law and new evidence uncovered during discovery,” Graham James, an NYT spokesperson, said in a statement provided to Ars.
In addition to clarifying one claim, NYT also agreed to voluntarily dismiss two claims of contributory copyright infringement and trademark dilution against all defendants.
A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars that the company views the amended complaint as “a last-ditch effort by the plaintiff to save its claim from unfavorable precedent set in other recent rulings.”
But in its motion, the NYT argued that neither Microsoft nor OpenAI would be prejudiced by allowing the amended complaint. It’s proper to allow plaintiffs to revise arguments when legal standards change, the NYT argued, and the case schedule would not be set back because “The Times does not seek any additional discovery in support of its amended claims.”
“As we have long alleged, Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal our copyrighted works,” James said. “Beyond amending that claim and streamlining the case to its most potent arguments, our core claims remain the same from the day we filed this lawsuit—that Microsoft and OpenAI stole millions of The Times’s copyrighted works to compete with our products and illegally enrich themselves.”