Major news organizations, including The New York Times, are urging a federal court to give little weight to the Department of Justice’s support for OpenAI in ongoing copyright litigation.
The outlets filed a formal response to the DOJ’s Statement of Interest, which argued that training artificial intelligence models on unlicensed content qualifies as fair use under copyright law.
The news organizations contend the DOJ’s legal analysis contradicts the position of the U.S. Copyright Office and lacks sufficient evidentiary context to be persuasive.
The publisher brief accuses the federal government of “ignoring completely the feasibility of licensing to accomplish the Department’s claimed objectives, despite the White House’s previous guidance that such licensing markets should be encouraged.”
The DOJ filed its Statement of Interest in September, urging the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to rule that using copyrighted works to train large language models constitutes fair use.
The department argued that a ruling against OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT) would distort copyright law, suppress innovation, and weaken U.S. competitiveness and national security.
The DOJ’s statement specifically addressed claims by The New York Times while also noting its reasoning applies to related cases involving book authors and publishers.
According to Reuters, the filing marked the first time the U.S. government has formally taken a position on copyright litigation concerning the use of copyrighted materials to train AI systems.
The DOJ’s sudden support for OpenAI surprised key federal agencies, including the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office, sources told Axios.
The department argued that narrower fair use protections would allow only the largest technology companies to afford licensing fees, ultimately entrenching legacy media and reducing competition in the large language model market.
OpenAI, which is privately held, and Microsoft (MSFT) have faced a wave of copyright lawsuits from publishers and authors who argue their content was used without permission or compensation to train AI models.
The New York Times responded sharply to the DOJ’s position, with spokesman Graham James issuing a pointed statement defending creators and the broader media ecosystem.
“The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” James said.
James added that “the Administration’s proposal to let companies take that content without permission or compensation would undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function.”
The case is being closely watched across the media, technology, and legal industries as courts wrestle with defining the boundaries of intellectual property in the age of generative AI.
