As many as 35 news publishers running over 400 newspapers in the U.S. have filed a federal lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI over alleged copyright violations involving scraping and copying thousands of their articles to train AI models like ChatGPT and Co-pilot.
The federal lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Southern District of New York on June 24 accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of profiteering from the original work of hundreds of reporters employed at these 400 newspapers that are usually family owned or small businesses.
“Defendants (Microsoft and OpenAI) have scraped, copied, and ingested content to build and commercialize their GenAI products that have generated hundreds of billions of dollars (and counting). Not a cent of it has gone to the Publishers whose work made it possible,” read the lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI.
The lawsuit mentions publishers like Richner Communications, AIM Media, Lakeway Publishers, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc, The New Mexican Inc.; Newspapers of Massachusetts, Inc.; Newspapers of New England, Inc.; Newspapers of New Hampshire, Inc.; North Country This Week, Inc.; The Ogden Newspapers, and others, who collectively own and operate nearly 400 local and regional newspaper outlets across the U.S.
“All of them have spent decades—and in some cases over a century—investing in the journalists, editors, and infrastructure required to produce the trusted, original reporting on which their communities depend.
The News publishers argue that the two companies “secretly” scraped the content of these 400 newspapers including paywalled articles and that their rich earnings are not “fruits of their ingenuity alone.”
“The Publishers’ journalism was essential to the Defendants’ explosive growth, and unless Defendants are held accountable for stealing, stripping, and misusing the Publishers’ content, the AI boom Defendants orchestrated and benefit from will be a death knell for local journalism—which remains the most trusted news sources in America,” read the lawsuit.
The publishers have demanded fair compensation for their content, immediate halt on further scraping of journalists’ works and removal of registered content from the LLMs of the two companies.
Journalists versus AI Companies: A Story of Human Labor versus Fair Use Policy
This is not the first time Microsoft and OpenAI have been sued by media houses over copyright violations for using their content without permission to train their AI models.
Media Outlets like The New York Times, CNN, Encyclopedia Britannica, India based ANI, and other media houses have filed lawsuits against AI companies for “theft” of their journalistic works without proper compensation.
Recently A.G. Sulzberger, chairperson for the New York Times company, in his speech, referred to AI platforms as parasites, “devaluing and threatening” the long term ability of news organizations to continue to provide trustworthy journalism.
OpenAI and other AI companies, in their defense, have maintained that their LLMs scrape websites, including news outlets, on the internet under “fair use” policy.
Also Read: With Anthropic, AI Companies are Finally Realizing How It Feels to be Scraped
