How copyright lawsuits could kill OpenAI

If you’re old enough to remember watching the hit kid’s show Animaniacs, you probably remember Napster, too. The peer-to-peer file-sharing site, which made it easy to download music for free in an era before Spotify and Apple Music, took college campuses by storm in the late 1990s. This did not escape the notice of the record companies, and in 2001, a federal court ruled that Napster was liable for copyright infringement. The content producers fought back against the technology platform and won.

But that was 2001 — before the iPhone, before YouTube, and before generative AI. This generation’s big copyright...