Part 23 - COUNT V: Digital Millennium Copyright Act – Removal of Copyright Management Information

COUNT V: Digital Millennium Copyright Act – Removal of Copyright Management Information (17 U.S.C. § 1202)

Against All Defendants

181. The Times incorporates by reference and realleges the preceding allegations as though fully set forth herein.

182. The Times included one or more forms of copyright-management information in each of The Times’s infringed works, including: copyright notice, title and other identifying information, terms and conditions of use, and identifying numbers or symbols referring to the copyright-management information.

183. Without The Times’s authority, Defendants copied The Times’s works and used them as training data for their GenAI models.

184. Upon information and belief, Defendants removed The Times’s copyright-management information in building the training datasets containing millions of copies of Times Works, including removing The Times’s copyright-management information from Times Works scraped directly from The Times’s websites and removing The Times’s copyright-management information from Times Works reproduced from third-party datasets.

185. Upon information and belief, Microsoft and OpenAI removed The Times’s copyright-management information through generating synthetic search results, including removing The Times’s copyright-management information when scraping Times Works from The Times’s websites and generating copies or derivatives of Times Works as output for the Browse with Bing and Bing Chat offerings.

186. Microsoft and OpenAI removed The Times’s copyright-management information in generating outputs from the GPT models containing copies or derivatives of Times Works.

187. By design, the training process does not preserve any copyright-management information, and the outputs of Defendants’ GPT models removed any copyright notices, titles, and identifying information, despite the fact that those outputs were often verbatim reproductions of Times content. Therefore, Defendants intentionally removed copyright-management information from The Times’s works in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b)(1).

188. Defendants’ removal or alteration of The Times's copyright-management information has been done knowingly and with the intent to induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement of The Times’s copyrights.

189. Without The Times’s authority, Defendants created copies and derivative works based on The Times’s works. By distributing these works without their copyright-management information, Defendants violated 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b)(3).

190. Defendants knew or had reasonable grounds to know that their removal of copyright-management information would facilitate copyright infringement by concealing the fact that the GPT models are infringing copyrighted works and that output from the GPT models are infringing copies and derivative works.

191. The Times has been injured by Defendants’ removal of copyright-management information. The Times is entitled to statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits, and other remedies provided by law, including full costs and attorneys’ fees.