The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The publishers allege that OpenAI used their original journalism without permission to train its artificial intelligence models and that its tools frequently output copyrighted excerpts in response to user prompts. Microsoft was named as a co-defendant due to its integration of OpenAI technology into Copilot.
The lawsuit joins a growing wave of litigation, including a legal action representing nearly 400 local newspapers, accusing AI companies of eroding publisher subscription revenues by substituting direct web visits with automated answers. As part of their demand, the two newspapers are requesting the destruction of all training datasets, copies of their work, and AI models derived from their copyrighted material.
Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft immediately responded to requests for comment regarding the filing. The case adds to an expanding list of legal challenges brought by major media entities, including The New York Times, over unauthorized data scraping for generative AI.
Why it matters
Potential remedies requiring model destruction pose massive existential risks to existing foundation model architectures.
Unsettled copyright lawsuits increase legal uncertainty for startups relying on web-scraped data for model training.
Source: theverge.com
