The Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Copyright Infringement
American news outlets The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in New York. The publishers allege that the tech companies scraped paywalled news articles without authorization to train their artificial intelligence models. This lawsuit highlights the intensifying conflict between publishers and AI developers over unauthorized content scraping and subscription revenue loss. Notably, the publishers are seeking court orders for OpenAI and Microsoft to destroy all infringing training datasets and trained models. The lawsuit claims that AI tools including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing AI generate verbatim excerpts or close paraphrases of articles, removing the need for readers to visit news sites. OpenAI responded that its models rely on publicly available data and fair use principles, while Microsoft expressed a willingness to communicate and resolve disputes.
## BACKGROUND
More than 70 copyright lawsuits have been filed against major AI developers, questioning whether training large language models on copyrighted content constitutes fair use. AI companies typically maintain that using public web text is transformative fair use, whereas media organizations argue it undermines paid subscription models and digital traffic.