The NYT vs OpenAI lawsuit: what are the implications for European brands?

US case law, not directly transposable to the EU. But the lawsuit creates industrial pressure that accelerates licensing deals and generalises the machine-readable opt-out. For European brands: GDPR/CDSM mechanism already offers the opt-out, activate it.

The NYT vs OpenAI lawsuit: what are the implications for European brands, in practice?

Complaint filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft on 27 December 2023 (Southern District of New York, 23-cv-11195), alleging copying of millions of articles to train GPT-3.5/4 without authorisation. Asks: injunction + damages (potentially billions of dollars). OpenAI counters on fair use and contests verbatim extraction. The case is slow: motions and discovery in 2024-2025, first substantive ruling expected late 2026 or 2027. Worth noting: this is a US case with no direct EU reach, but it functions as an industry signal.

Impact on the licensing market

Observed sector impact 2024-2026: OpenAI signed paid deals with Axel Springer (estimated €10-15M/year, announced December 2023), Financial Times (April 2024), Le Monde, Wall Street Journal, Vox Media, Reddit, Time, Vogue. Anthropic partnered with Reuters. Publishers without deals bet on the NYT trial for case law. The AI-press licensing market is still in its early years, concrete figures remain partly confidential, but a €5-30M/year range is emerging for premium international media.

Three practical recommendations for an EU brand

For European brands, three positions to adopt without waiting for the NYT outcome. (a) The CDSM Article 4 + EU AI Act Article 53 mechanism already offers a legally binding opt-out, less need to wait for US case law; deploying the 2026 robots.txt pattern (Disallow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) is enough. (b) Premium European publishers can negotiate deals with OpenAI / Anthropic / Google, FT, Le Monde did it, the precedent exists. (c) Institutional B2B sites benefit little from a licensing deal but must activate the training opt-out to preserve editorial IP. "Do not wait for the NYT outcome: deploy the 2026 robots.txt pattern now and watch the licensing deals being signed, they are the market-pricing signal," says Lorenzo Eeman, founder of PROEMA. Sources: NYT v. OpenAI Microsoft Complaint S.D.N.Y. 23-cv-11195, Reuters legal coverage 2024-2026, FT licensing deal communiqué April 2024, Politico EU December 2024, Axel Springer / OpenAI press release December 2023.