Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Scraping

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday, escalating publisher legal battles over unauthorized AI training data scraping.

"While both Newsday and The Seattle Times support responsible AI innovation, it is also imperative that we protect the significant investments we have made in our respective unique content," Tara Rogers, a spokesperson for Newsday, said in a statement.

The 38-page complaint, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, targets the tech companies for allegedly utilizing copyrighted journalism without authorization or financial compensation to train their generative artificial intelligence models.

This legal action arrives amid a broader wave of litigation from the publishing industry against major artificial intelligence developers. Similar copyright lawsuits have been filed by major publications including The New York Times, demonstrating a widening chasm between media companies whose business models depend on subscriptions and ad revenue, and tech firms building large language models on vast corpuses of web-scraped text.

"Like a snake eating its own tail, GenAI that is trained on painstakingly researched, expensive-to-produce content threatens to destroy the very news organizations by competing directly with them through AI-generated substitutive content," the complaint reads.

News executives emphasize that the financial stakes for regional and local journalism are severe. Producing verified investigative reporting and daily news requires millions of dollars in annual newsroom expenditures, resources that publishers argue are undermined when AI systems reproduce or summarize that reporting without compensating creators.

"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.

Response from the technology sector has emphasized openness to future commercial discussions despite surprise over the litigation. Microsoft, which maintains a multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI alongside its own proprietary AI infrastructure development, addressed the filing.

"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," a spokesperson for Microsoft stated.

As the litigation moves through the Southern District of New York, the case is expected to test legal precedents regarding fair use, digital copyright protection, and the limits of web scraping for commercial machine learning development. The outcome could force AI developers to negotiate widespread licensing agreements with regional publishers or fundamentally alter how training datasets are curated.