OpenAI asked Magistrate Judge Wang to grant an extension to answer the New York Times First Amended Complaint pending the court’s ruling on the New York Times’s motion for leave to file a second amended complaint to fix its allegations for the DMCA CMI 1202(b)(1) intentional removal of CMI claim. The request sounds eminently reasonable.
Writes OpenAI:
In light of Plaintiff The New York Times’s April 15, 2025 motion for leave to file a second amended complaint (New York Times, No. 1:23-cv-11195-SHS-OTW, ECF 524), OpenAI respectfully requests that the Court extend the current deadline for OpenAI to respond to The Times’s August 12, 2024 First Amended Complaint (currently set on April 29, 2025) until 21 days after the Court rules on The Times’s motion for leave. The Times opposes OpenAI’s request, arguing that the Court has already granted one extension and that OpenAI has no reason to seek a further extension. But requiring OpenAI to respond to The Times’s current complaint before the Court decides the pending motion for leave to file a new complaint could lead to duplication, inefficiency, and waste.
The Court granted in part and denied in part OpenAI’s motions to dismiss The Times’s First Amended Complaint on March 26, 2025. (New York Times, ECF 485.) This set OpenAI’s deadline to respond to the operative complaint for April 9, 2025. See Fed R. Civ. P. 12(a)(4)(A). But in the intervening time, on April 3, 2025, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation issued a transfer order centralizing twelve cases in this Court to, among other things, “conserve the resources of the parties, their counsel, and the judiciary” and “ensure overall economies.” (MDL No. 3143, Dkt. No. 85 at 2-3 (explaining that “[o]pportunities abound for the transferee judge to redirect the parties onto a more efficient path”).) The next day, on April 4, 2025, OpenAI sought an extension of time to respond to the complaints in the News Cases (New York Times, ECF 515) given the pending coordination or consolidation in the MDL. On April 7, 2025, the Court granted OpenAI’s motion, extending the time to respond to April 29, 2025 “without prejudice to further extensions.”