The federal judge upheld the ruling directing Open Eye to store deleted data for deletion, including news outlets that included the Orlando Sentinel, which sued the tech giant.
The new ruling issued Thursday in Manhattan federal court denied the company’s objection to an earlier court order instructing OpenAI to maintain the data used to train artificial intelligence bots.
Openai executives claim that they are simply protecting users’ privacy by opposing data retention requests or orders.
However, the plaintiff’s lawyer said the privacy debate was nothing more than a distraction.
“It’s like a magician who tries to misdirect the public’s attention,” said Stephen Lieberman, a lawyer representing the Sentinel and several other media outlets.
“That’s absolutely wrong. The judge has made it clear, and the plaintiffs don’t want to receive information that personally identifies users of these conversations. The data will only be handed over anonymously, and Openai doesn’t know that.
A key discussion of publishers at the heart of their lawsuit is that the data that bolsters the company’s popular ChatGPT includes millions of copyrighted works from news organizations.
The publication claims that such content is being used without consent or payment. This leads to large-scale copyright infringement.
Various reports have put the company in value of $300 billion, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world thanks to ChatGPT, an online chat box released in 2022.
But the raw materials – the creative content redistributed – Openai took a cheap and easy way, Lieberman said.
“They just stole it from the authors of newspapers, magazines and books,” he said.
Openai says he hasn’t fought this issue.
“We continue to believe that the New York Times overreach request to maintain users’ ChatGPT conversations is a violation of years of privacy norms, and we will continue to fight against it,” a company spokesperson said.
Openai claims that the vast amount of data used to train artificial intelligence bots is protected by “fair use” rules. Doctrine applies to rules that allow copyrighted work to be used for purposes such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, education, research, and more.
However, newspaper lawyers argue that fair use tests involve converting copyrighted works into new ones, and that new works cannot compete with the original in the same market.
The court rejected Openai’s position that the newspapers were not creating “snippets of evidence” that people are using ChatGpt or Openai’s API products to get news instead of paying for it.
The New York Times originally filed a lawsuit in December 2023. The Sentinel filed a lawsuit along with other newspapers from affiliate Tribune Publishing and Medianews Group, filed in April 2024.
Other outlets include Tribune Publishing’s South Florida Sun Sentinel and the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Mercury News in San Jose, California, Denver Post, Orange County (California) Register, and St. Paul (Minnesota) Pioneer Press.
Original issue: 5pm, June 27th, 2025
