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Publishers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft for Data Scraping
26 Jun
Summary
- Nearly 400 publishers filed a lawsuit over copyright infringement.
- They allege AI models were trained on news content without consent.
- The suit claims this harms local journalism and violates copyright law.
A coalition of nearly 400 print and digital news publishers has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of mass copyright infringement. The publishers allege that the companies' AI programs, including ChatGPT and Copilot, were trained by systematically and secretly crawling hundreds of news websites. This information scraping allegedly occurred without compensation or consent from the news organizations.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, asserts that this practice violates the Copyright Act of 1976. The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits, and attorney's fees. They contend that the unauthorized use of their journalism, which required billions of dollars to sustain, is destabilizing an industry already under strain and threatens the future of local news reporting.
This legal action follows similar copyright infringement complaints filed against OpenAI by other entities, including Ziff Davis and The New York Times. The publishers emphasize that their journalism is vital for civic participation and community cohesion, and its uncompensated use by AI companies could lead to the demise of trusted local news sources.
