Maybe a lawyer can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't understand why some people in the article appear to think that this is causing OpenAI to breach their privacy agreement.
The privacy agreement is a contract, not a law. A judge is well within their rights to issue such an order, and the privacy agreement doesn't matter at all if OpenAI has to do something to comply with a lawful order from a court of competent jurisdiction.
OpenAI are like the new Facebook when it comes to spin.
Yep. Laws supersede contracts. Contracts can’t legally bind any entity to break the law.
Court orders are like temporary, extremely finely scoped laws, as I understand them. A court order can’t compel an entity to break the law, but it can compel an entity to behave as if the court just set a law (for the specified entity, for the specified period of time, or the end of the case, whichever is sooner).
If I made a contract with OpenAI to keep information confidential, and the newspaper demanded access, via Court discovery or otherwise, then both the Court and OpenAI definitely should be attentive to my rights to intervene and protect the privacy of my confidential information.
Normally Courts are oblivious to advanced opsec, which is one fundamental reason they got breached, badly, a few years ago. I just saw a new local order today on this very topic.[1] Courts are just waking up to security concepts that have been second nature to IT professionals.
From my perspective, the magistrate judge here made two major goofs: (1) ignoring opsec as a reasonable privacy right for customers of an internet service and (2) essentially demanding that several hundred million of them intervene in her court to demand that she respect their ability to protect their privacy.
The fact that the plaintiff is the news organization half the US loves to hate does not help, IMO. Why would that half of the country trust some flimsy "order" to protect their most precious secrets from an organization that lives and breathes cloak-and-dagger leaks and political subterfuge. NYT needed to keep their litigation high and tight and instead they drove it into a ditch with the help of a rather disappointing magistrate.
[1] https://www.uscourts.gov/highly-sensitive-document-procedure...
Local American laws supersede the contract law operating in other countries that OpenAI is doing business in?
local country laws supersede contract law in that country, as far as i am aware.
us law does not supersede foreign contract law. how would that even work? why would you think that was possible?
A court order can be a lawful excuse for non-performance of a contract, but it's not always the case. The specifics of the contract, the court order, and the jurisdiction matter.
OpenAI is breaching relevant laws that regulate data protection. Being compelled by a foreign power, for instance, are not grounds for data processing under GDPR.
OpenAI has not started to "be incompliant" with GDPR with this order, yes. More like OpenAI was always incompliant because it does not have relevant controls installed that mitigates extraterritorial tendencies of US law.
Regardless of legality of retention this order brings, them not notifying their users (the court did not compel them to hide this from their users (no gag order is in place) about this material change of data processing, could be constituted as breach of various consumer protection laws, misrepresentation, unfair dealing, false advertising and related.