The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit Friday in federal court in Manhattan against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the tech companies' artificial intelligence products infringe on the news organizations' copyrights and trademarks.
The 38-page complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, states that OpenAI and Microsoft extracted data from the newspapers' websites through scraping, including content behind paywalls, and incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's AI features.
According to the lawsuit, the AI products developed by the defendants can reproduce excerpts from the news organizations' reporting, often verbatim, without compensation. The complaint alleges that the tech companies' AI models violate the newspapers' copyrights by ingesting their journalism and reproducing it in this manner.
Newsday, based in Long Island, New York, and The Seattle Times, based in Seattle, contend that the defendants' AI-generated content competes directly with their journalism. The complaint states that generative AI 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 news organizations argue in the filing that if the defendants are permitted to continue, "independent journalism of the kind Plaintiffs produce will struggle to survive."
The lawsuit names both OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and Microsoft as defendants in the action brought by the two newspapers.