Gmail is an Electronic Communication Service as defined in 18 U.S.C § 2510, meaning its contents are protected under the Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. Chapter 121 §§ 2701–2713).
Communications with an AI system do not involve a human so are not protected by ECPA or the SCA and get less protection. This is controversial and some people have called on ECPA/SCA to be extended to cover AI services. That means a warrant would be necessary to get your OpenAI history, not just a subpoena.
In a way it's like someone talking to themselves in the bathroom mirror. It's almost a higher privacy expectation than regular emails. You expect no human to see it at all.
Of course this principle applies to Gmail too, if you’re willing to accept the absurdity. I could copy-paste copyrighted NYT snippets into emails and send them to everyone I know. Under the same logic, the NYT would be entitled to have access to everyone's Gmail account in order to verify who's sending what and get compensated if anyone is infringing their copyright.
That’s not justice. That’s legal extortion.
I get that people are angry at OpenAI. But let’s not confuse outrage over one company with support for broken systems. Patent and copyright trolls thrive when we normalize overreach, whether it’s AI training data or email threads. If we let corporations weaponize IP law to control every digital whisper, we’re not protecting creators, we’re burying free expression under a mountain of lawsuits.
If you made it your business to publish a newsletter containing copied NYT articles, then wouldn't they have the right to go after you and discover your sent emails?
Exactly, they wouldn't even need all of the emails in gmail for that example, just the ones from a specific account.
The real equivalent here would be if gmail itself was injecting NYT articles into your emails. I'm assuming in that scenario most people would see it as straightforward that gmail was infringing NYT content.
If you make a business out of that, then yes, it is copyright infringement and thus you can be sued. Are we supposed to be outraged over someone making a business out of newspaper articles they did not wrote being potentially sued?
Your example is not nearly an example of copyright troll or overreach.
