Journalism's Price Tag: Non-Profit Sues Microsoft and OpenAI Over Unauthorized Use of Content

PLAINTIFF’S COPYRIGHT-PROTECTED WORKS OF JOURNALISM

36. Plaintiff owns the exclusive copyright to all works published in the Mother Jones magazine since 1978 (the “Registered Works”), and (with a few exceptions) has registered monthly and bimonthly issues of its magazines with the Copyright Office since 1978. A list of copyright registrations applicable to the Registered Works is attached as Exhibit 1.

    
    

37. Registered Works dating back to the January/February 1995 issue are available on Mother Jones’ website, https://www.motherjones.com/customer-service/back-issues/back-issues1995/. In addition, pursuant to an agreement between Plaintiff and Google, Registered Works are available online through Google Books, https://books.google.com/books/serial/ISSN:03628841?rview=1. All the Registered Works are available online on at least one of these websites.

    
    

38. Mother Jones has published its journalism online since 1993, and digitized older material at significant cost.

    
    

39. Plaintiff owns copyright to additional articles under the Mother Jones brand and the Reveal brand that are not registered with the Copyright Office. These articles are published, respectively, on the web domains motherjones.com and revealnews.org. Plaintiff owns copyright to at least 95 percent of the articles on motherjones.com (including but not limited to all the Registered Works), the rest of which are licensed and published with permission. Plaintiff owns copyright to all of the articles on revealnews.org. Plaintiff’s online-only works are not registered because the Copyright Office does not currently offer an economically feasible way to register works that are published only online.

    
    

40. Plaintiff’s copyright-protected works are the result of significant investments by Plaintiff through its reporters and other resources necessary to tell important stories. Making award-winning investigative journalism is harder and more expensive than ever, which is why many news outlets have recently abandoned investigative reporting teams in their newsrooms. Most investigative stories require months to report and some even take years, costing significant sums of money to tell stories that otherwise go untold.

    
    

41. The protection of CIR’s intellectual property is critical to its continued ability to fund its nonprofit public interest journalism. Without control of its copyrighted content for revenue purposes, nonprofits news organizations like CIR will have even fewer journalists able to tell the ever-more dwindling number of investigative news stories that are already disappearing at an alarming rate in the today’s paltry media landscape. With fewer investigative news stories told, the cost to democracy will be enormous. Indeed, the vital importance of investigative reporting to democracy is why CIR maintains two websites and a digital archive at significant cost.

    
    

42. CIR depends on its exclusive rights of reproduction, adaptation, publication, performance, and display under copyright law to resist these forces. That is why Mother Jones has registered its copyright since inception, dating back nearly fifty years. CIR has also maintained an ongoing licensing program, and implemented a terms of service that set limits on the use of its content. For instance, CIR requires third parties to provide notice and obtain permission before using CIR content or trademarks for commercial purposes, and for decades CIR has licensed its content under negotiated licensing agreements to other news media outlets.

    
    

43. In addition, newsrooms, including CIR, have long had licensing programs sharing content with one another, at a cost, to create new reporting. For instance, newsrooms often contact CIR for its decades-old archive of video footage and online articles, which CIR sells at market rate. Publishers also frequently contact CIR to license articles from the Mother Jones archives. CIR has dedicated staff to manage this service and readymade contracts to easily assist these requests.

    
    

44. Unlike countless other publishers in the industry that have contacted CIR to license material, Defendants never contacted CIR to license its work in any way. Instead, Defendants simply took what they wanted with no regard for the intellectual property rights of CIR or other publishers.

    
    

45. CIR has never given permission to any entity, including Defendants, to use its content for GenAI purposes.