Seattle Times and Newsday File Joint Copyright Infringement Lawsuits Against OpenAI and Microsoft

The Three-Question Framework

What Happened?

The Seattle Times and Long Island’s Newsday filed federal copyright infringement lawsuits in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against OpenAI and Microsoft. The publishers allege that millions of proprietary investigative articles were ingested into Common Crawl and proprietary training corpora without consent or licensing compensation.

Why It Matters

While national giants like The New York Times and Axel Springer have either settled or litigated independently, regional news organizations represent the foundation of local investigative reporting. If courts reject the 'fair use' defense for commercial LLM pre-training, frontier AI developers could face tens of billions in statutory copyright liability or court-mandated model destruction.

What Could Happen Next

Federal judges are considering consolidating the regional lawsuits alongside existing publisher actions, while the US Copyright Office prepares its definitive report on generative AI training liabilities.

Executive Key Takeaways

Regional journalism stalwarts Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft in New York federal court.

Complaint documents verbatim retrieval of paywalled investigative articles via ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

Publishers request statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work and the destruction of infringing model weights.

Further deepens the split between publishers signing content deals (e.g. News Corp, Vox) and those seeking judicial remedies.

On September 6, 2026, two of America’s most prominent regional newspapers—The Seattle Times and Newsday—formally filed joint federal copyright infringement lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft.

Filed in the Southern District of New York, the complaints detail how OpenAI’s web scrapers systematically indexed paywalled investigative journalism spanning decades. The plaintiffs demonstrate through extensive forensic evidence that ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot can be prompted to reproduce word-for-word excerpts of copyrighted investigative exposés, including Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting, without citing the original source or respecting robot exclusion protocols.

'Independent journalism requires immense capital investment, professional risk, and weeks of boots-on-the-ground reporting,' said the legal counsel representing the publishers. 'Silicon Valley giants cannot simply vacuum up our intellectual property to power multi-billion-dollar commercial products while starving regional newsrooms of subscription and advertising revenue.'

OpenAI and Microsoft have consistently defended their scraping activities under the doctrine of 'fair use,' arguing that analyzing statistical relationships between words constitutes transformative analysis analogous to human learning. However, several recent rulings in visual and literary copyright cases have cast doubt on whether commercial AI systems that directly compete with the original works can qualify for fair use protection.

The outcome of the lawsuit could set a vital legal precedent determining whether frontier AI labs must establish universal licensing clearinghouses similar to the music streaming industry.