A coalition of nine regional news organizations, including The Virginian-Pilot, Los Angeles Daily News, Hartford Courant, and six others, filed a sweeping copyright lawsuit Wednesday against Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI Inc., claiming the tech giants willfully used their protected content to train generative AI products. The complaint, lodged in New York federal court, seeks damages exceeding $10 billion.
The lawsuit underscores the growing tension between traditional publishers and AI developers, with the news outlets asserting that “there is no longer any question” that large language models scrape copyrighted works from the internet without permission, heedless of publisher rights.
Allegations of Large-Scale Copyright Theft
The complaint asserts that OpenAI’s GPT models have “memorized” the copyrighted works of authors and publishers, producing “verbatim or near-verbatim” reproductions when prompted. The plaintiffs argue that a ten-figure award is justified not only as compensation but also because it pales in comparison to the massive profits Microsoft, OpenAI, and their investors have generated from the unlicensed use of protected content.
The group includes the California Newspapers Partnership, Prairie Mountain Publishing Co., The Boston Herald, The Daily Press, The Morning Call, and The San Diego Union-Tribune.
