This post appears to be full of people who aren’t actually angry at the results of this case but angry at how the US legal system has been working for decades, possibly centuries since I don’t know when this precedent was first set
The company records and uses this stuff internally, retention is about keeping information accurate and accessible.
Lawsuits allow in a limited context the sharing of non public information held by individuals/companies in the lawsuit. But once you submit something to OpenAI it’s now there information not just your information.
Maybe so, but this has always been the case for hundreds of years.
After all, how on earth do you propose having getting fair hearing if the other party is allowed to destroy the evidence you asked for in your papers?
Because this is what would happen:
You: Your Honour, please ask the other party to turn over all their invoices for the period in question
Other Party: We will turn over only those invoices we have
*Other party goes back to the office and deletes everything.
The thing is, once a party in a suit asks for a certain piece of evidence, the other party can't turn around and say "Our policy is to delete everything, and our policy trumps the orders of this court".
This is much more concerning (from a privacy perspective) than a company using cookies to track which pages on a website they’ve visited.
It’s the collection itself that’s the problem not how soon it’s deleted as economically worthless.
> with no guarantees of security, no audits, and few safeguards.
The courts pay far more attention to that stuff than profit maximizing entities like OpenAI.
There are many situations in which the deletion/destruction of ‘worthless’ data is treated as a security protection. The one that comes to mind is how some countries destroy fingerprint data after it has been used for the creation of a biometric passport. Do you really think this is a futile act?
>”The courts pay far more attention to that stuff than profit maximizing entities like OpenAI.”
I would be interested to see evidence of this. The courts claim to value data security, but I have never seen an audit of discovery-related data storage, and I suspect there are substantial vulnerabilities in the legal system, including the law firms. Can a user hold the court or opposing law firm financially accountable if they fail to safeguard this data? I’ve never seen this happen.
Cashed data isn’t necessarily available for data retention to apply in the first place. Just because an ISP has parts of a message in some buffer doesn’t mean it’s considered as a recording of that data. If Google never stores queries beyond what’s needed to serve a response then it likely wouldn’t qualify.
Also, it’s on the entity providing data for the discovery process to do redaction as appropriate. The only way it ends up at the other end is if it gets sent in the first pace. There can be a lot of back and forth here and as to evidence that the courts care: https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_5.2
Yes, that's by design and already hundreds of years old in practice.
You cannot refuse a court evidence to protect your or anyone else's privacy.
I see no reason to make an exception for rich and powerful companies.
I don't want a party to a suit having the ability to suppress evidence due to privacy concerns. There is no privacy once you get to a civil court other than what the court, at its discretion, allows, such as anonymisation.
For me, one company obligated to retain business records during civil litigation against another company, reviewed within the normal discovery process is tolerable. Considering the alternative is lawlessness. I'm fine with it.
Companies that make business records out of invading privacy? They, IMO, deserve the fury of 1000 suns.
However, if the ISP, for instance, is sued, then it (immediately and without a separate court order) becomes illegal for them to knowingly destroy evidence in their custody relevant to the issue for which they are being sued, and if there is a dispute about their handling of particular such evidence, a court can and will order them specifically to preserve relevant evidence as necessary. And, with or without a court order, their destruction of relevant evidence once they know of the suit can be the basis of both punitive sanctions and adverse findings in the case to which the evidence would have been relevant.
Not "all", just the ones involved in a current suit. They already routinely do this anway (Party A is involved in a suit and is ordered to retain any and all evidence for the duration of the trial, starting from the first knowledge that Party A had of the trial).
You are mischaracterising what happens; you are presenting it as "Any court, at any time can order any party who is not involved in any suit in that sourt to forever hold user data"
That is not what is happening.
No, actually, it doesn't. Ordering a party to stop destroying evidence relevant to a current case (which is its obligation even without a court order) irrespective of whether someone else asks it to destroy that evidence is both within the well-established power of the court, and routine.
> Or find specific infringing chatters and order OpenAI to preserve these specified users’ logs.
OpenAI is the alleged infringer in the case.
That is ridiculous. The company itself receives that order, and is IMMEDIATELY legally required to comply - from the CEO to the newest-hired member of the cleaning staff.
No it needs to show how often it happens to prove a point of how much impact its had.
It’s very impressive they managed to do such innovation in their spare time while running a newspaper and site
which is irrelevant at this stage. Its a legal principle that both sides can fairly discover evidence. As finding out how much openAI has infringed copyright is pretty critical to the case, they need to find out.
After all, if its only once or twice, thats a couple of dollars, if its millions of times, that hundreds of millions
Because its a copyright infringement case, so existence and the scale of the infringement is relevant to both whether there is liability and, if so, how much; the issue isn't that it is possible for infringement to occur.
The allegation is not that merely that infringement is possible; the actual occurrence and scale are relevant to the case.
Google can (and would) file to keep that data private and only the relevant parts would be publicly available.
A core aspect to civil lawsuits is everyone gets to see everyone else's data. It's that way to ensure everything is on the up and up.
Courts generally require far more data to be retained than shared, even if this ask is much more lopsided.
Just erasing the userid isn’t enough to actually anonymize the data, and if you scrubbed location data and entities out of the logs you might have violated the court order.
Though it might be in our best interests as a society we should probably be honest about the risks of this tradeoff; anonymization isn’t some magic wand.
Courts have been dealing with discovery including secrets that litigants never want to go public for longer than AOL has existed.
Depending on the exact issues in the case, a court might allow that (more likely, it would allow only turning over anonymized data in discovery, if the issues were such that that there was no clear need for more) but generally the obligation to preserve evidence does not include the right to edit evidence or replace it with reduced-information substitutes.
Which would be chump change[0] compared to the costs of an actual trial with multiple lawyers/law firms, expert witnesses and the infrastructure to support the legal team before, during and after trial.
Not just that, even without a specific court order parties to existing or reasonably anticipated litigation have a legal obligation that attaches immediately to preserve evidence. Courts tend to issue orders when a party presents reason to believe another party is out of compliance with that automatic obligation, or when there is a dispute over the extent of the obligation. (In this case, both factors seem to be in play.)
https://codiscovr.com/news/fumiko-lopez-et-al-v-apple-inc/
https://app.ediscoveryassistant.com/case_law/58071-lopez-v-a...
Perhaps the larger lesson here is: if you don't want your service provider to end up being required to retain your private queries, there's really no way to guarantee it, and the only real mitigation is to choose a service provider who's less likely to be sued!
(Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
The power does not extend to any of your hypotheticals, which are not about active cases. Courts do not accept cases on the grounds that some bad thing might happen in the future; the plaintiff must show some concrete harm has already occurred. The only thing different here is how much potential evidence OpenAI has been asked to retain.