In the US, Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft
In the United States, The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on September 4, accusing the companies of copyright infringement. As Channel NewsAsia reports, the publications claim that the technology companies copied their journalistic materials without permission to train artificial intelligence systems.
Newspapers' claims
According to the plaintiffs, OpenAI and Microsoft collected materials from the newspapers' websites, including content available only through paid subscriptions. The newspapers say these articles were included in datasets used to train and operate ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and the AI features of the Bing search engine.
The newspapers, based in Seattle and on Long Island in New York State, said the companies' products can reproduce excerpts from their publications, closely paraphrase articles, and provide answers that make users less likely to visit their websites or subscribe. The Seattle Times President and Chief Executive Officer Alan Fisco told employees that the publication spends millions of dollars annually to create content and must protect it from use without consent or compensation.
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Companies' positions and lawsuit demands
An OpenAI spokesperson said that the company's models are trained on publicly available data and that such use is based on the fair use doctrine. At the same time, he did not comment on the lawsuit specifically. Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit but recognizes the importance of local journalism and is ready to discuss ways to resolve similar disputes.
The Seattle Times and Newsday ask the court to order the destruction of copies of their works, as well as datasets or AI models into which these materials were incorporated. The case echoes a lawsuit filed by The New York Times in 2023 against OpenAI and Microsoft. In that case, the newspaper also accused the companies of using millions of articles without permission to train OpenAI's chatbot; the proceedings are ongoing.
