The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal, sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Monday for using copyrighted material without permission.
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and details allegations of copyright violations as well as how “artificial intelligence’s written summaries of articles threaten publishers.”
“OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more powerful, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organizations that license our material,” CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting Monika Bauerlein said in a statement. “This free rider behavior is not only unfair, it is a violation of copyright. The work of journalists, at CIR and everywhere, is valuable, and OpenAI and Microsoft know it.”
“For-profit corporations like OpenAI and Microsoft can’t simply treat the work of nonprofit and independent publishers as free raw material for their products,” Bauerlein continued. “If this practice isn’t stopped, the public’s access to truthful information will be limited to AI-generated summaries of a disappearing news landscape.”
The Center for Investigative Reporting is the oldest nonprofit newsroom in the country, having registered copyright for nearly fifty years. Mother Jones has been publishing since 1972 and each issue has copyright protections.
This comes as publishers are reckoning with either litigating for copyright violation damages or partnering with AI firms to license content for a fee.
Similar lawsuits have been filed in recent months against the AI companies including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, The Intercept, AlterNet, Raw Story, and more.