On Friday, Magistrate Judge Wang denied a motion to compel discovery brought by defendants Microsoft Corporation and OpenAI in an action relating to defendants’ use of plaintiff New York Times’ copyrighted works to train defendants’ large-language models.
Defendants sought to compel the production of plaintiff’s use of, and statements about, AI tools, asserting the evidence was relevant to their fair use defense. Plaintiff argued that the request was “neither relevant nor proportional to the needs of the case.”
The court agreed with plaintiff, holding that defendants had “not demonstrated the relevance of the information sought.” Fair use factors “require[] scrutiny of a defendant’s purported use of the copyrighted work(s), and whether that defendant’s use may constitute ‘fair use’ under the Act.” (emphasis in original). The court explained that fair use did not extend to plaintiff’s statements or comments about, or interactions with, defendants’ industry:
This case is about whether Defendant trained their [large-language models] using Plaintiff’s copyrighted material, and whether that use constitutes copyright infringement. It is not a referendum on the benefits of Gen AI, on Plaintiff’s business practices, or about whether any of Plaintiff’s employees use Gen AI at work. The broad scope of document production sought here is simply not relevant to Defendant’s purported fair use defense. For example, if a copyright holder sued a video game manufacturer for copyright infringement, the copyright holder might be required to produce documents relating to their interactions with that video game manufacturer, but the video game manufacturer would not be entitled to wide-ranging discovery concerning the copyright holder’s employees’ gaming history, statements about video games generally, or even their licensing of different content to other video game manufacturers