A large group of nationwide print and digital publishers has banded together to sue OpenAI and Microsoft for mass copyright infringement.
The publishing coalition, comprising nearly 400 news publishers spanning local and regional outlets, alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and reviewed by TheWrap that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot “systematically and secretly crawled” hundreds of news websites to scrape information used to train their AI programs. The publishers said this was done without compensation or consent from the affected newsrooms.
The plaintiffs include dozens of local and regional newspaper operators from across the country, among them Richner Communications, AIM Media’s Indiana, Midwest and Texas operations, The New York Amsterdam News, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, CherryRoad Media, Community Impact Newspaper Co., The New Mexican, Ogden Newspapers, Straus Newspapers, WEHCO Newspapers and Wick Communications.
“The publishers’ journalism was essential to the defendants’ explosive growth, and unless Defendants are held accountable for stealing, stripping and misusing the publishers’ content, the AI boom Defendants orchestrated and benefit from will be a death knell for local journalism — which remains the most trusted news sources in America,” the complaint read.
The document continued, saying that the scraping of news websites violated the Copyright Act of 1976, the federal law that governs copyright protections and gives creators exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute and profit from their original works. It accused both OpenAI and Microsoft Corp. of three counts of infringement and sought statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits and attorney’s fees.
Alongside that, the complaint alleged that the web scraping used to train large language models would further harm local journalism across the country. Without credit or compensation, the tools, it said, would further destabilize an industry already under strain.
“The Publishers have spent billions of dollars to sustain this work,” the complaint read. “Defendants helped themselves to all of it – without providing a cent of compensation.”
“As a Democracy Fund analysis of numerous studies demonstrates, local journalism has demonstrably increased civic participation, produced greater cohesiveness in communities and reduced public corruption,” the complaint added.
This is far from the first copyright complaint OpenAI has faced as its language models continue to grow and proliferate. Both Ziff Davis – who is the parent company for websites like Mashable, IGN, CNET, and more – and The New York Times have also filed their own copyright infringement complaints against the tech company.
OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately return TheWrap’s requests for comment.
