Fact Discovery in Authors’ Suits vs. Microsoft, OpenAI to Be Complete by Sept. 17

Substantial production of documents for all discovery requests served by Jan. 29 will be completed by June 14 in the two consolidated authors’ copyright infringement complaints against Microsoft and OpenAI, said a scheduling order (dockets 1:23-cv-08292 and 1:23-cv-10211) signed Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein for Southern New York in Manhattan. The plaintiffs had proposed a May 10 deadline and the defendants, Aug. 31 (see 2401280001). Fact discovery in the consolidated cases will be complete by Sept. 17 and expert discovery by Dec. 9, said the order. The plaintiff authors in the two lawsuits allege that Microsoft and OpenAI copied their protected works on a mass scale without consent or compensation, then fed those copyrighted works into their large language models to train their AI algorithms (see 2401120005).