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.

Part of a Broader Wave of AI Copyright Litigation

This latest suit follows a growing wave of copyright litigation targeting AI models. Previous plaintiffs include comedian Sarah Silverman, novelist Paul G. Tremblay, The New York Times, and prominent authors like John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and David Baldacci. Many of these cases have been centralized in the Southern District of New York for pretrial proceedings.

Microsoft’s Role in AI Development Scrutinized

The news outlets allege that Microsoft has been intimately involved in the development, training, and commercialization of OpenAI’s GPT models. Microsoft, which provides the sole cloud infrastructure for OpenAI via Azure, helped design supercomputing systems that powered ChatGPT’s training. The plaintiffs claim that “hundreds of thousands” of copyrighted works were copied multiple times to train the AI models without licenses or compensation.

Removal of Copyright Management Information

The complaint highlights that Microsoft and OpenAI allegedly removed copyright management information (CMI) during the scraping process. Plaintiffs contend the companies knew that CMI would not be retained, effectively concealing the infringement while generating AI outputs based on protected works.

The suit asserts claims for:

• Copyright infringement

• Vicarious copyright infringement

• Contributory copyright infringement

• Removal of CMI in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The plaintiffs seek more than $10 billion in damages, restitution, destruction of AI models that use the works, injunctive relief, litigation costs, and attorney fees.

OpenAI Defends AI Training Practices

An OpenAI spokesperson told Law360 Wednesday:
“ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives. Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.”

Representatives for Microsoft and counsel for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

Legal Representation

The news outlets are represented by Steven Lieberman, Jennifer B. Maisel, Robert Parker, Jenny L. Colgate, Kristen J. Logan, Bryan B. Thompson, and Alexandra Hughes of Rothwell Figg Ernst & Manbeck PC. Counsel information for Microsoft and OpenAI was not immediately available.