Hollywood stars and unions back New York Times in AI copyright case against OpenAI

Anne Hathaway and Madonna are among the supporters named in an amicus brief backing The New York Times in its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. Hollywood unions have filed a separate brief backing the Times. The brief argues that companies building AI systems should pay for the creative works they use. Its strongest point is practical: licensing is workable. The defendants have argued that licensing creative works for AI training is prohibitively expensive and that there is no settled way to value training data. The amicus brief filed by a coalition led by Cate Blanchett's nonprofit, the Human Consent Foundation, says the facts show otherwise.

The 31-page brief was filed in the Southern District of New York on a Friday and obtained by TheWrap. It was co-signed by CAA, the Music Artists Coalition, the National Association of Voice Actors and the Creators Coalition on Artificial Intelligence. Its appendix lists supporters including Anne Hathaway, Bette Midler, Emma Thompson, Helen Mirren, Dan Levy, Ron Howard, Madonna and Olivia Wilde. The central analogy is collective licensing. The brief says creative industries have run collective licensing frameworks for over a century. These bodies act as centralized clearinghouses, granting blanket licenses and using automated, metadata-driven systems instead of negotiating each work separately. It cites the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers and Broadcast Music, Inc as examples. That is the brief's answer to the cost objection: rights for dispersed works already get cleared at scale and cost-effectively, it says.

Deadline reported that the Writers Guild, SAG-AFTRA and the American Federation of Musicians filed their own joint brief on October 29. The talent agency WME filed a separate amicus brief on October 30. Signed by its legal chief Courtney Braun and the outside firm Jayaram PLLC, the WME brief states that its position "is therefore not that AI use of creative materials should be stopped, but that it should be licensed." The agency stops short of opposing AI outright. It argues that uses affecting creators' rights must come with proper compensation and authorization, and that the law should preserve creators' ability to decide whether and on what terms their work trains AI systems. The brief also points to licensing activity as evidence of a market. It says more than two dozen licensing deals or partnerships were announced between mid-2023 and mid-2024, with at least 28 involving payment for access to training data, including News Corp's reported five-year, $250 million agreement with OpenAI.

The Justice Department has taken the opposite side. Deadline reported that a September filing from the department said "The United States has a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law." The Times sued in December 2023, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of using its journalism to build products that compete with it. The original complaint says the companies seek to "free-ride" on the Times' investment. OpenAI told TheWrap at the time that it was "surprised" by the lawsuit and said its conversations with the Times had been productive. TheWrap said OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to its request for comment.