> What you described is entirely fair use, actually

Just like during the pandemic how everyone became an epidemiologist, suddenly everyone's a copyright lawyer. I'll just dispute your assertion by saying:

1. Questions of fair use are famously gray, and anyone who declares something as "entirely fair use", with no caveats, is nearly always wrong except for the must obvious cases, which the given example is most definitely not. A judge has wide latitude in determining fair use.

2. People should familiarize themselves with the four factors of fair use determination. In particular, if a work is purely derivative of a source work and substantially negatively impacts the market for the original work, it's very likely to not be considered fair use.

A great overview is https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

I would say it is arguable that is fair use, but the whole thing about fair use is that it is a defense, not a type of license or something you can preemptively apply. So whether or not it will be protected under fair use is actually not determined yet. In fact I would say that’s the entire debate here, right?

I have worked on many documentaries and any time we said “fair use” internally what we were implicitly saying is “nobody will come after us because they know that we are probably safe under fair use if this escalated.“ But again, we could never preemptively apply it. We were just anticipating potential conflict and gauging how likely it was to occur.

>What you described is entirely fair use, actually.

Based upon what? You think other publishers use NYTimes articles for free without license?

Sourcing, quoting, and linking is covered in the NYTimes content policy under fair use. See: https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014891408-Obta...

I think what wouldn't be covered is reproducing substantial portions of an article, especially if it's done without attribution. Tier 2 publications that fully reprint NYT or AP/Reuters articles are usually doing this via a paid News Service or Content License. See: https://nytlicensing.com/content/new-york-times-news-service...

A lawyer starts a conclusion like this:

"It could be fair use if conditions a, b, and c are met. Condition a means..." ;)

Isn't that the thing though? If they credit the source, it's fine, but ChatGPT usually doesn't

Do you have some examples & are you sure they don't pay licensing fees to NYT?

Correct. But those 2nd tier sources don't have the NYT copy verbatim. Do you really think the US NFL, as an example, would let OpenAI use all of its recorded games as a way to train some new GenAI game framework to build better American Football games? No. All that material is copyright. Public media is going to move to a very awkward era of ownership and licensing because all of these large companies looking to make a buck off public data sets are doing very little to make the economic model less one sided.

I hope the NYT prevails here, personally. Models will (and are) currently tainted by data they should not contain and for longer term privacy concerns this needs to be addressed early and have significant consequences or we're headed towards a world where this type of technology will make our ad-targeted world seem like a much more manageable past.

it's fair use if you don't make money from your project no?