How, um....
...convenient!
Accident? My arse!
The New York Times has filed a letter in its copyright infringement case against OpenAI and Microsoft, alerting the court that the ChatGPT maker accidentally deleted a bunch of data that may have been evidence. The letter [PDF], filed yesterday in the Southern District of New York by lawyers for the Times, asserts that OpenAI …
Their backups were made and kept in a micro-data centre made from a containerised shipping box, and located somewhere in France. Unfortunately, the UPS batteries failed and started a fire which destroyed the backups, along with all the other contents of the micro-data centre. The custom lightweight magnesium floor-plates may have been an additional contributing factor to the thoroughness intensity of the fire.
The way data is extracted from the evidential hard drive is not by sticking it in a pc and doing a copy. First off the drive should be cloned under careful supervision, and that cloned copy should solely be used to issue copies to plaintiff and defence alike. We're talking about the entire history of everything that ever was written to the drive, including deletion of files, extension of edited documents, because they have outgrown their initial hard drive allocation, copying new files, and overwriting of deleted files because that is how file allocation algorithms may work. SSD's have their own peculiarities regarding these algorithms, but this is of no consequence so long as the clones have faithfully captured the results. This is data forensics 101, no?
If either party wishes to stick their copy in a pc and copy files from it is entirely up to them, but that ignores such important things as chronology, and what is now no longer there on the surface.