SDNY Judge Resets Deadline for Microsoft, OpenAI to Answer Authors Guild Suit

Jan. 26 is the newly revised deadline for defendants Microsoft and OpenAI to answer the Authors Guild’s Dec. 5 amended copyright class action (see 2312060054), said an order signed Thursday by U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein for Southern New York in Manhattan. Friday previously was the defendants’ deadline for answering the complaint. The guild and 17 authors, including John Grisham and Scott Turow, allege that Microsoft and OpenAI copied their works “wholesale, without permission or consideration.” The defendants are then alleged to have fed those copyrighted works into their large language models, algorithms designed to output “human-seeming text responses” to users’ prompts and queries. The guild and the authors allege that Microsoft and OpenAI are guilty of “systematic theft on a mass scale.”