Subject is a quote from an internal MS email about OpenAI hovering up copyrighted material.
This gem also cropped up in discovery
Quote"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models 'hoovering up' all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions," said one internal Microsoft document from 2023.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/technology/microsoft-openai-publishing-industry.html
It brings to mind the most enduring question in the history of crime: what did the president know and when did he know it?
This comes down to what we consider a human right. I don't think work is usually considered one of them. UBI vs the right to labor is an interesting debate imo. What is capitalism when labor loses it's value?
In this case, I don't think the plaintiff is concerned with a human right to labor so much as their right to continue to extract money from their IP without further labor.
So the framing as a theft of "labor" is odd, but it does constitute a smoking gun that they knowingly engaged in theft of something. That is, at least some people thought what they were doing was theft.