AI’s ‘astonishing theft’
The case is New York Times v. Microsoft and OpenAI, and it’s getting outsized attention because the stakes are so high for the news business.
The Daily News and several other publishers are also plaintiffs in the case, which seeks to prove that tech companies violated copyright law en masse while training AI models. A victory would mean a very, very big check to compensate the news outlets that were ripped off.
The case is at a crucial stage right now: summary judgment, when a judge rules for one side or another before a full trial. “Documents related to the case are slowly being unsealed” as the judge weighs the arguments, the NYT’s Karen Weise and Mike Isaac explained here.
And yesterday’s document release was a doozy. Lawyers for the publishers revealed the existence of an internal Microsoft document from 2023 that said “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”
The document was authored by Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science, who also wrote that it was perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history.”
“For the Times and its fellow plaintiffs, Microsoft’s admission amounts to a smoking gun — evidence that Microsoft and OpenAI knew that they were stealing journalism without permission or payment,” WaPo’s Scott Nover and Gerrit De Vynck wrote.
Steven Lieberman, a lawyer who represents some of the publishers, said “the world can see what OpenAI and Microsoft thought all along about the fairness of their own behavior.”
Hecht’s quotes certainly seem to be a problem for the defense, though Microsoft framed Hecht (who’s also a Northwestern professor) “as someone on the payroll to play a contrarian,” Molly Crane-Newman of the Daily News wrote.
Microsoft said in a statement, “These comments reflect one employee’s individual perspective, are not a legal analysis, and do not represent the company’s views. Microsoft’s position is set out in its court filings, which explain why these transformative uses are consistent with copyright law and why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism.”
For the counterargument, here’s the PDF of the publishers’ full motion to the judge.
Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger alluded to his battle against Microsoft and OpenAI in a column marking today’s 175th anniversary of the news organization. His piece is in print with the headline “15 Million First Drafts of History.”
While the Times is in a stronger position today than at any point in its history, Sulzberger recognizes many other outlets are struggling.
“The future of America’s free press is uncertain,” he wrote. “As the advertising-based business model that long supported original reporting has collapsed, the country has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers and a vast majority of local journalism jobs in just two decades.”
“This erosion appears poised to continue as the journalism produced at great cost by news organizations is stolen and repurposed at unprecedented scale by the tech giants behind artificial intelligence,” he continued. “And in this financially weakened state, the press is simultaneously confronting, and sometimes buckling in the face of, the most direct political attacks on its rights and legitimacy in more than a century.”
Sulzberger made similar comments at an A-list party in Tribeca last night. I posted the full text of his remarks on X here.
>> “Republicans have found a use for him. Democrats have not figured out what to do about it.” That’s how Eugene Daniels sums up the arguments about Hasan Piker. Daniels and Symone Sanders Townsend taped an interview with Piker for their “Clock It” podcast. (MS NOW)
>> President Trump is holding the Kennedy Center “hostage,” Philip Kennicott writes. He says “Trump hasn’t just destroyed a building, or an arts center. He has dispersed a community, or, rather, multiple communities who discovered each other every night.” Now, he says, arts lovers are in “anguish.” (WaPo)
>> Trump is barely being mentioned or shown in GOP TV ads for the midterms, Jeff Zeleny and David Wright report. (CNN)
Brendan Carr’s FCC has “granted Paramount Skydance’s request to allow Middle Eastern royal families to hold a substantial stake in a merged Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery,” the LAT’s Meg James reports. “The sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi are slated to indirectly own nearly 50% of the equity in David Ellison’s proposed mega-studio.”
The FCC said the foreign investors will “not have any influence, direction, or control over “Paramount’s content decisions” or “company management.” But the FCC’s lone Democrat, Anna Gomez, doesn’t believe that. Gomez said yesterday, “An investment this large in one of America’s biggest media companies doesn’t just buy equity, it secures influence over what gets said and made.”
One of the WSJ’s most-read stories today is an exclusive by Rachel Bachman and Emily Glazer titled “The Super Donor Quarterbacking Michigan Sports: Larry Ellison’s Wife.”
Jolin Ellison, class of 2012, is an “intensely private and particularly powerful alumnus,” the pair report. Their story is full of incredible detail, and many on-the-record quotes from Jolin, but here’s the part that stuck out to me: “The couple has five children.”
When you ask a chatbot how many children Larry Ellison has, the usual answer is two — David and Megan, who were both born in the 1980s. But Larry has married and divorced several times since then. Earlier this year, NYMag’s Reeves Wiedeman reported that Larry and Jolin “have been quietly raising four young children.” And now, according to the WSJ, a fifth child has been born.
Everyone has a right to privacy, of course, but to me this is a reminder that there’s a whole lot we don’t know about a man whose immense wealth gives him so much influence. I’m going to keep this Journal reporting in mind the next time someone claims to know what Larry Ellison is really thinking vis-à-vis Paramount, WBD and CNN…
California AG Rob Bonta sure doesn’t sound like someone who’s about to settle with Paramount–WBD. On MS NOW, when asked about the latest talk of Paramount leaving the state, he said, “We’ve heard this threat before, and it’s inconsistent with other things that they have said.”
He also rebutted the argument that he’s endangering jobs by suing to stop the deal: “This merger is a threat to jobs.”
Bonta vowed “not to be distracted by threats.” He said much the same thing at The Atlantic Festival an hour later, and also knocked the Trump admin: “We, respectfully, didn’t think the United States DOJ did an adequate review and we thought we needed to step into that breach.”
Emphasis on the word “we.” Sometimes the news coverage about this standoff reduces it to a personal clash between Bonta and David Ellison. But that’s misleading: California is just one of twelve states suing to block the deal.
The NYPost’s Charlie Gasparino has been saying that “Paramount expects” high-profile California Dems like L.A. mayor Karen Bass “to speak up and squeeze Bonta as the Oct. 1 deadline approaches.”
But as he wrote yesterday, “there’s no guarantee” that the pressure will “force Bonta to back off his structural changes demand.” And recent history suggests otherwise…
Broadcasters and tech giants “are writing big checks to state officials who have weighed in on mergers,” the WSJ’s Jessica Toonkel and Neil Mehta write in this new look at corporate donations to state AGs, including Bonta.
The lead example: Newsmax boss Chris Ruddy donated $8,000 to Kansas AG Kris Kobach five days after Kobach “joined a sweeping lawsuit to block a merger between two of Ruddy’s competitors…”
Universal Pictures “is now leaning toward releasing the buzzy, four-hour ‘Musk’ feature after all,” THR’s Steven Zeitchik wrote yesterday, following up on his article about Universal seemingly getting “cold feet” about Alex Gibney’s examination of Elon Musk.
Zeitchik wrote that his first article “sparked criticism directed at the studio, leading to a series of internal meetings at the Comcast-owned film unit.”
But Universal told me nothing had changed, and it remains committed to the international release: “The studio is currently working through our international release strategy.” In the US, Bleecker Street will release the film on October 9…
What’s it like to be a federal judge on the receiving end of MAGA media attacks? Mattathias Schwartz has some fresh reporting about that in this NYT piece about Judge Patrick Schiltz, who granted a rare interview.
Schiltz conveyed how a fellow judge, Douglas L. Micko, was denounced “by Trump-aligned media outlets” for rejecting arrest warrants for Don Lemon, among others, in Minnesota.
The media condemnation “was followed by a series of violent threats, which have not been previously reported. In the interview, Judge Schiltz revealed that Judge Micko and his family had to be moved to a secure location, where they remained for several days. Judge Schiltz said that the administration’s statements were part of what had put Judge Micko in danger.”
In the latest edition of his Second Rough Draft column, veteran editor Richard Tofel writes that “we need to know more on the wounded, damaged bases and munitions shortages” stemming from the Iran war.
“The Pentagon has consistently understated the losses,” he writes, so news outlets “need to devote more resources to enterprise on basic questions like casualties, buildings destroyed and bases perhaps effectively lost, and vulnerabilities created by shortages in armaments and overtaxed personnel.”
I linked to CBS reporting about that earlier this week; ABC also ran a report titled “Photos show extensive damage to US Middle East bases…”
>> Bill Grueskin went deep on the Alabama trial that led to the NYT’s “first defamation defeat in this country in more than fifty years.” He says “Times journalists misplayed their hand” at almost every turn. (CJR)
>> Margaret Sullivan highlighted the stories Fox News fans aren’t hearing about: “The network continues to cater to its presidential ‘audience of one’, downplaying his supreme court loss and more.” (The Guardian)
>> David Streitfeld explored the tech world’s tendency to write, and write, and write. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is one of its “most prolific and polished explainers.” (NYT)
>> Adam Elder looked at how the “once-predictable ESPN is wagering its future on a polarizing, overcaffeinated commentator,” and asked: “How much Pat McAfee is too much?” (NYMag)
>> Callie Holtermann shadowed Steve Kornacki during a long night of the “Kornacki Cam,” noting that the live-streaming has shown “promising signs” for NBC. (NYT)
>> Will Sommer watched The Daily Wire’s new action thriller starring Jonathan Majors. His verdict? “Instead of a streaming hit,” it “was just a wildly anti-Muslim, comically badly acted film—albeit one that comes with an intriguing psychosexual undercurrent.” (The Bulwark)
>> Andrew Beaton, Katherine Sayre and Elias Leight revealed details of “the 40-minute phone call that left Ed Sheeran’s tour hanging by a thread.” (WSJ)
>> Mark Stenberg talked with Wikipedia’s brand director about the nonprofit’s “plan to survive the answer engine apocalypse.” (AdWeek)
There’s a lot of insight about that in Kate Knibbs’ newest article for WIRED. The headline: “Polymarket’s Next Bet? It Can Also Be a Media Company.”
“Providing data is only a small part of how these companies function as new media entities,” Knibbs writes. “On social media, their official accounts post like news outlets, adopting a vernacular that mashes up PopCrave’s frenzied sensibility with Bloomberg’s coverage areas.” Polymarket has a weekly podcast, too.
And she expects more: “As these companies keep expanding their reach, their media maneuvers will only grow more important. There may well be other efforts to refine editorial products in the near future, even a renewed attempt to hire journalists…”
>> “ABC responded to the FCC’s justification for calling in its eight owned station licenses for early renewal, arguing in a new legal filing that the agency had failed to refute ‘substantial evidence’ of a Trump administration ‘retaliatory motive.’” (Deadline)
>> Megan Morrone, most recently the tech editor at Axios, is moving to CNBC to be tech editor there. (TBN)
>> Correction: Yesterday I misgendered Shawn Hubler of the NYT. My apologies to her.
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here. Hope you have a great weekend!