Intellectual property is the foundation of the American economy. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, industries that rely heavily on intellectual property account for 41% of the country’s GDP. Intellectual property empowers free speech and encourages the production of high-quality works and the creative process, which applies to podcasters, influencers, and journalists alike.
Although artificial intelligence businesses are aware of this feature, they have regrettably decided to use other people’s intellectual property to support their goods. By employing their ingenuity and intelligence, the Chinese AI app DeepSeekis is now teaching those very AI firms how much it costs.
This nation has thrived by promoting innovation and providing legal protection for the outcomes, but as technology has advanced over the last few decades, new rulings are required to adapt our legal system to new developments.
For this reason, a broad coalition of news and magazine members of the News/Media Alliance united on Thursday to file a lawsuit against an AI business that we believe has been flagrantly infringing copyright restrictions as it trains its model and generates responses for its consumers.
Conde Nast, The Atlantic, Forbes Media, The Guardian, Business Insider, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy Media Co., Newsday, Plain Dealer Publishing Co., Politico, The Republican Co., Toronto Star Newspapers, Vox Media, and Advance Local Media—the parent company of this website—are among the plaintiffs.
We are suing Cohere Inc., a quickly expanding artificial intelligence startup, for allegedly not even attempting to conceal the fact that it is stealing content and providing consumers with it verbatim for free.
News/Media Alliance lawsuit against Cohere Inc. details verbatim lifting of articles
Cohere has amassed a valuation of over $5 billion by systematically violating media content’s copyright and trademarks. The Canadian business presents its own receipts as proof. As detailed in our lawsuit, Cohere displays the sources it used to produce its outputs, including complete copies of our articles, together with the copying timestamp, in a feature called Under the Hood.
Cohere offers users breaking news reports, fully substitutional summaries, and verbatim regurgitations. The case filed on Thursday claims thousands of instances of infringement, including the copying’s timestamp.
Cohere’s numerous actions of what we consider to be theft are not subtle in the least. The lawsuit describes how articles are copied verbatim, including when a story is posted within an hour of its publication. For example, Cohere provided the full article verbatim with only minor phrasing and punctuation changes when asked to provide a specific October 2024 story from the L.A. Times.
In response to a general question concerning the financial burden on Miami-Dade County’s public transportation system, Cohere read an entire Miami Herald article, with the exception of the first sentence. Cohere provided the content of an article from Forbes, along with the writer’s byline, in response to another assignment.
Media companies aren t anti-technology
We have no other option, yet lawsuits can be drawn out and expensive. Over the years, we’ve tried everything: updating our terms of service, working directly with tech companies, digitally reserving or marking our content as off-limits to bots and scrapers, demanding that they return a small portion of the traffic they have generated from our content, and occasionally even paying them for it.
However, AI businesses have reaped the vast majority of the benefits, leaving the media industry with only a small portion of the value generated by our own content.
By focusing on new actors and unauthorized uses to enforce our rights and discourage other AI companies from stealing content, this lawsuit is in line with the brave examples of The New York Times, which sued Microsoft and OpenAI for using its articles in generative AI products without permission, and News Corp., which is suing Perplexity AI for the same reason.
This is neither an attempt to go back in time nor an anti-AI lawsuit. We adore technology. Our businesses make use of it. If artificial intelligence respects intellectual property, it will improve customer service. We are pursuing that remedy in court.
The AI businesses make similar claims to ours when it suits them.Bright Data was charged in Meta’s complaint of violating its terms of use by scraping data. Additionally, OpenAI’s Sam Altman has claimed that DeepSeek unlawfully replicated its algorithms.
There is some promise for improvement thanks to responsible technologies, good actors, and possible regulation. However, strengthening legal safeguards against theft is what every market desperately needs.
The News/Media Alliance, which represents 2,000 news and magazine media outlets globally, is led by Danielle Coffey as its president and CEO.
