Ads Arriving to Amazon Prime Video; New York Times Sues OpenAI & Microsoft; Google Settles $5bn Lawsuit

by Aimee Newell Tarín on 3rd Jan 2024 in News

On today’s ExchangeWire digest: Ads Arriving to Amazon Prime Video; New York Times Sues OpenAI & Microsoft; Google Settles $5bn Lawsuit…

As we welcome in the New Year, changes are afoot. Last week, Amazon announced it will be introducing ads to its Prime Video service. Ads will be arriving soonest to users in the US and Canada from later this month, on 29th January. Users in the UK and Germany will see ads from 5th February. Throughout the year, Amazon plans to implement the change to Prime in France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia. To avoid seeing ads, UK customers will have to pay £2.99 per month. Meanwhile, German customers will have to pay €2.99 (£2.60), and US customers $2.99 (£2.35).

Looking back to 2023, its final days saw some big legal action. The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, over the companies’ use of its content to train generative AI and large-language model systems. The New York Times claims that its content was given “particular emphasis”, and that OpenAI sought “to free-ride” on the publication’s large investment into its journalism by building products without permission or payment. The lawsuit calls on the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data which use copyrighted material from the Times. It does not contain a monetary claim, but states that both parties should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages”.

Unsurprisingly, Google’s legal battles also made headlines – this time for its agreement to settle a USD $5bn class-action privacy lawsuit filed in 2020, which alleged that it spied on “incognito” Chrome users. It claimed that Google continued to catalog details of users’ activity and send it back to its servers, despite private browsing mode being in use. When the suit was filed, it sought USD $5bn on behalf of users; now a final settlement agreement is expected by 24th February.