The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday in a US federal court, accusing the tech companies of copyright infringement for allegedly using the newspapers' journalism without permission to train and operate their artificial intelligence systems.
The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. It alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers' websites, including content behind paywalls, and incorporated their articles into datasets used to train and operate products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features, according to a Reuters report.
The newspapers, based in Seattle and Long Island, New York, alleged that the companies' AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase their articles and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or purchase subscriptions.
"We feel strongly that we must defend our content-which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce-from being used without our consent or compensation," Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, according to Reuters.
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An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters that its models are trained on publicly available data and that the company believes its practices are protected by fair use. The spokesperson did not comment specifically on the lawsuit.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Microsoft, based near Seattle in Washington state, told Reuters in an email that they are surprised by the lawsuit but recognised the importance of local journalism. "While we're surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of local journalism and we're always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute," as per the Reuters report.
The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking an order requiring OpenAI and Microsoft to destroy copies of their works, as well as any training datasets or AI models that incorporate the newspapers' content.
The lawsuit adds to a growing number of legal disputes between news organisations, copyright holders and AI companies over the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI systems.
In 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of using millions of its articles without permission to train AI models. That case remains ongoing and is among dozens of lawsuits filed by copyright holders against companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta over the alleged unauthorised use of their material to train AI systems.
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