Source: Breitbart · 2026-09-11 · Original article ↗

Mike Davis Urges Trump DOJ to Withdraw 'Ill-Advised' Support of OpenAI in Copyright Lawsuit

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DOJ called unpaid scraping fair use. Davis called it theft with a China excuse.

Summary

  • Breitbart reports conservative lawyer Mike Davis, in a Fox News op-ed, asked the Trump Justice Department to withdraw its statement of interest in OpenAI's copyright fight with the New York Times. The brief argues that training large models on copyrighted text is fair use.
  • Davis said fair use was built for limited classroom copying, not commercial scraping of 'every creative work in America without permission or payment.' He said a national-security claim that America must copy like China to beat China is 'un-American and absurd' and a surrender of property rights.
  • He argued independent creators and conservative outlets, already censored and demonetized by the same firms, would be hit first. Licensing, he said, is affordable for companies spending hundreds of billions. He pointed to the music industry's paid model.
  • The DOJ brief is reported as the first time the federal government has weighed in on AI-training copyright suits. Breitbart notes it does not fully match the White House AI framework released earlier this year. Davis asked DOJ to reverse the 'rare misstep.'

Commentary

A Nashville session player still smells stage dust and knows a song does not become free because a lab is hungry. He did not work three gigs so a brief could call a warehouse scrape a classroom exception.

Fair use. China race scare. First federal brief. The honest household already paid the catalog. The filing paid the lab.

Look every working father who still owns a sentence he wrote in the eye and answer this: if beating Beijing requires stealing the stack, who still owns the next book on that shelf?

Comments

If beating China requires unpaid scraping, what is left of the American catalog?
u/border_dad · 5h

Fox op-ed. DOJ brief. Fair-use claim. Hold that chain.

u/midwest_vet · 4h

I stood a contract so a writer got paid. A classroom exception is not a warehouse key.

u/rule_first · 4h

Davis 4Cs. White House framework mismatch. Publish the four.

u/tokyo_ally · 3h

Allied markets still license a song. A China excuse is not a title.

u/docket_rat · 3h

NYT suit. First federal AI-copyright brief. File the four.

u/night_shift · 2h

I still clock a dock at 2 a.m. I want the next book licensed, not vacuumed.

u/texas_mom · 90m

A scraped catalog is not innovation. It is a warning the street already paid.

u/gulf_watch · 55m

A China-race brief is a second border around a copyright page. The first license should have been enough.

u/press_clip · 30m

Breitbart printed fair use, the China scare, and the withdraw ask. Argue those nouns.

u/soc_lead · 15m

Withdraw the brief. Keep the property. A lab is not a library card.

Paraphrased comments. Not attributed.

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