What happened
Hollywood's labor and creative guilds filed amicus briefs on Tuesday supporting The New York Times in its ongoing copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, according to Crypto Briefing. The underlying case, filed by the Times in December 2023 in the Southern District of New York, accuses OpenAI and its largest backer of ingesting millions of Times articles to train GPT models without a license.
The amicus filings don't make the guilds parties to the suit. They do push a specific argument into the record: that mass training on copyrighted creative output is a compensation question for the people who produced that work, not a transformative use that qualifies for fair-use protection. The brief lands at a moment when the court is weighing motions that will shape how discovery proceeds and which claims survive to trial.
Why it matters
The Times case is the lead vehicle. Dozens of publisher and author suits are stacked behind it, and most will inherit whatever doctrine the SDNY lays down on fair use, derivative works, and the question of whether an AI model's weights count as a copy of its training data. Hollywood weighing in changes the political temperature.
The 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes already made AI the central labor fight in American creative industries, and the new filings extend that fight into federal court with the full backing of guilds that negotiated AI protections into their contracts last cycle. A plaintiff-friendly ruling would push frontier labs toward paid licensing of training data, retroactive settlements, or model retraining on cleaner corpora.
That's expensive. It also hands leverage to anyone who can prove their work sits in a training set.