Law professor Brian Frye files amicus brief arguing AI training can benefit journalism through attribution

What happened

Tulane Law professor Brian L. Frye, an intellectual-property scholar, filed an amicus brief in the consolidated OpenAI copyright infringement litigation (In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, S.D.N.Y., Judge Sidney H. Stein), together with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and filmmaker Ron Suskind and the CEO of a small AI company that built a model intended for journalists. Tulane Law School reported the filing on 2 November 2026.

The argument

The brief addresses the fair-use analysis, focusing on whether AI training harms the market for or value of the copyrighted works. Frye argues that training a model on copyrighted newspaper articles does not harm the market for those articles in any relevant way, because their primary value lies in attribution, not reproduction: what newspapers sell is their brand, not individual articles. AI companies can therefore mitigate any harm by attributing their output to its sources, which would drive new readers and revenue to newspapers. The brief urges the court to focus on the public interest in generative AI by requiring a compromise that benefits the parties and the public.

What this does and does not change

This is an argument to the court, not a ruling: the court has not decided the fair-use question in the consolidated cases. The brief supports neither party outright and differs from the Wikimedia Foundation's 30 October 2026 amicus in the same litigation, which split model training (likely fair use) from retrieval-augmented generation (should follow licences); Frye's brief turns on the market-harm factor and an attribution remedy.