Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Copyright Infringement

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in a United States federal court on Friday. The newspapers allege that the technology companies copied their journalistic content without permission to train artificial intelligence systems. The legal action, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims that the companies used scraping to extract data from the newspapers' websites, including content protected by paywalls. This data was then incorporated into datasets used to operate products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's AI features.

The plaintiffs argue that these AI products can reproduce passages of their reporting, paraphrase articles closely, and provide answers that reduce the need for users to visit their websites or purchase subscriptions. Alan Fisco, the President and CEO of the Seattle Times, stated in a message to employees that the organization must defend content that costs millions of dollars annually to produce against use without consent or compensation. The newspapers are seeking a court order for the destruction of copies of their works and any training datasets or AI models that incorporate them.

An OpenAI spokesperson stated that its models are trained on publicly available data and are based on the principle of fair use, though the spokesperson did not comment specifically on the lawsuit. A Microsoft spokesperson expressed surprise at the lawsuit but noted the importance of local journalism and a willingness to explore solutions. This case follows a similar 2023 lawsuit by the New York Times and is part of a larger trend of dozens of lawsuits filed by copyright holders against AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.