Newspapers are realizing that they’re sitting on a goldmine
OpenAI has just announced an agreement with the publishers of El País and Le Monde to use their content to train the Spanish and French versions of ChatGPT and other generative models.
The settlements come amid the company’s legal battle with The New York Times, which has taken it to court for using its content without permission. Logically, the agreements with El País and Le Monde indicate that the company has no intention of continuing to trigger intellectual property rights litigation with media outlets around the world.
The New York Times decided to sue OpenAI after it submitted several prompts to ChatGPT that it says resulted in verbatim articles from the newspaper. OpenAI argues that these results were not obtained through normal use of its algorithm, and that they were the result of a hack whereby someone had introduced a series of restrictions to achieve that result. The Times’ owners refute this, saying it is “as irrelevant as it is false” and demand compensation for the use of its articles.
This raises a fundamental question: can someone be sued because, after reading a newspaper, they wrote an article based on its contents? This is not the case here, and until now, most lawsuits related to web-scraping, the appropriation by bots of content made available to the public, had ruled in…
