Seattle Times Newsday sue OpenAI Microsoft

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the technology companies of unlawfully using their copyrighted journalism to train artificial intelligence models. The suit, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that the companies systematically scraped articles from the newspapers' websites, including content behind paywalls, to incorporate into datasets for AI systems like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and the AI-powered Bing. The publishers contend that these AI products can reproduce entire passages or closely paraphrase reporters' work, thereby diminishing the need for users to visit their websites or purchase subscriptions. This practice, they argue, threatens the economic viability of the news industry by cutting into traffic and digital advertising revenue. The lawsuit also claims that copyright management information was stripped from articles and that the AI models sometimes attribute false information to the outlets.