The protagonists are probably in a stalemate right now. They go to court because one side thinks they have rocks in their arsenal and the other thinks they have boulders. These cases take years to litigate. Can not see how copy-write licensing changes implemented ~5 years from now will protect NYT's current business model or content. AI/GenAI is a fast moving target that keeps evolving and is unwieldy at best - that makes it very difficult to scope and even more difficult to impede. I think the Judge will implore them to come to terms and settle asap** and he/she will pass the 'creative license'/AI issue to the lawmakers to address. **Microsoft is the puppet master in this negotiation. A gnarly opponent no one wants to have!
As a New Yorker, I want David, aka New York Times, to triumph over Goliath. Actually, they're all Goliaths. It's a question of degree plus the nimbleness of the brain-power their respective legal teams may have.
Training AI on copyright works is not actually illegal. For lawmakers it's like taking a peek in a Hornet's nest to see if the bitey things are awake. Media outlets are not the only ones impacted by copyright infringement. Actors are concerned that AI bot-fakes created in their image, with their voice & works (which is copyright content) exist today and are so realistic that they pass as genuine. Just recently an AI system in China created a bot-fake (both image and voice) of a distinguished US physician, then trained their AI on all of his 15 books & released it as a chatbot to the Chinese public for psychological guidance. No permission was granted by the publisher or the doctor. The chatbot developer contacted him after the fact. The doctor's wife said that she could not tell that it was not her husband when she was given access to the chatbot to try it out. The AI chatbot developers have now figured out that they can skirt a specific country's copyright laws by residing in a country where the laws have little traction. -Hornets do not sleep. Edited to correct difference between copyright & copy-write (got a kind DM to ask me to check it out - tnx for that). There are people who copy-write as a profession, but my post does not refer to them.
The Times is part of mainstream media that's 90-percent owned by only six large corporations. Given that, it's Goliath vs. Goliath.
