Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the technology companies scraped their journalism without authorization or compensation to train generative AI systems.

"This was not an easy decision," said Alan Fisco, President and CEO of the Seattle Times, in an email to employees. "However, 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."

Court Filings and Alleged Scraping

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The legal complaint alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped publisher websites, including paywalled content, to train commercial products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's artificial intelligence features.

The plaintiffs are seeking financial damages alongside a court order requiring the destruction of all AI training sets and unauthorized copies of works that utilized their published material.

Corporate Responses

Representatives for both defendants issued statements addressing the litigation following the filing.

"While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of the Seattle Times to our region and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute," said a Microsoft spokesperson in an emailed statement.

OpenAI defended its data collection practices, pointing to legal doctrines regarding data usage.

"Our models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, which helps hundreds of millions of people improve their daily lives and delivers benefits such as empowering human creativity, science, and medical research," said an OpenAI spokesperson in a statement.