Let’s check in on our hero, Batman. The campy Adam West one. When we last saw him, he was in a giant coffee cup on the roof of a building. There was an even larger metal coffee pot brewing scalding hot coffee about to tip and, well, scald him. There, that end of an old part one of a Batman two-parter should set the right tone.
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Last December, the New York Times sued OpenAI for (feel free to use the Dr. Evil scene in the original Austin Powers here), one… billion… dollars for using their original copyrighted material without permission.
Much like Pesci did in My Cousin Vinnie, I argued that the Times’s case didn’t hold water. Unlike his character, I’m not a lawyer. But, even I could see it would take a Herculean effort to show that OpenAI violated fair use. It would take even greater brilliance to explain damages from violating copyright to get anywhere near a billion-dollar court deal.
To explain this, I’m going to need two monkeys playing chess. Admittedly, I’m ripping this off from Émile Borel’s 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters couldn’t randomly bang out a Shakesperean sonnet in 100 years. He ripped it off Jonathan Swift who cribbed it from Blaise Pascal who lifted it from Aristotle’s the Nature of Gods.
Origins. Schmorigins. The monkey playing white and representing the New York Times case opens with his first of ten threats in a row. A la Garry Kasparov. He taunts the other monkey who’s a stand in for OpenAI with Barney Stinson’s terrific line from How I Met Your Mother, “You better call Leg Warehouse, you’re going to need something to stand on.”
Lawyers for The Times and OpenAI have been parrying with paperwork over this case like Daffy Duck and Porky Pig did when they were dressed like Robin Hood and Friar Tuck except, I’m reasonably certain no one said, “It’s a buck and quarter quarterstaff but don’t tell anyone.”
And, here's my own repurposed punchline – verbatim – from January, “Media is a systemically derivative business.”
It is damn hard to create an infinite number of original ideas. I’m 352 stories in and I can tell you (a line clearly stolen from the start of every ChatGPT story), there are very few original ideas out there. I’d guess maybe ten things I’ve written were my ideas. That number is probably higher than Jeff Spicoli when he banged his shoe against his head and said, “I’m so wasted.” At best, most stories combine a couple of unoriginal ideas and come up with something new-ish. At their far-more-common worst, you get an old story with a little twist or a new line.
The OpenAI side must have read my January story. Because it’s core to their defense. I mean it’s not impossible. It’s been viewed 151 times. OpenAI is “seeking journalists’ source materials to assist in its defense of a multi-million copyright infringement claim…” to know “How original its (the Times’s) copyrighted articles are.”
I know this because I read Glenn Gabe’s tweet. Of an Ernesto Van der sar story on Torrent Freak.
“Check.” If OpenAI proves my statement and shows that nearly all of journalism is unoriginal, “…mate.”