The VCR will always invoke a sense of nostalgia, but Microsoft hopes it can help in court; it’s citing the tech in its attempt to dismiss three claims in The New York Times’ copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
The Times sued Microsoft for allegedly copying its stories and using that data to mimic its style, but Microsoft’s lawyers are now arguing that OpenAI’s large language models are just the latest in a long line of technologies that are considered legal despite their potential for copyright abuse. “Despite The Times’s contentions, copyright law is no more an obstacle to large language model than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, copy machine, personal computer, internet or search engine),” reads one...