In a continued legal battle, eight prominent US newspapers, including The New York Daily News and The Chicago Tribune, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in a New York federal court.
The newspapers, owned by Alden Global Capital, accuse the tech giants of copyright infringement related to the training of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.
The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft unlawfully used millions of copyrighted articles without permission or compensation to develop their AI products. The plaintiffs assert that the defendants must obtain consent from publishers for the use of their content and pay fair value for such usage.
Furthermore, the newspapers claim that OpenAI and Microsoft provided verbatim excerpts of full articles and attributed misleading or inaccurate reporting to the publications in certain contexts, further exacerbating the copyright violations.
Among the other newspapers involved in the lawsuit are The Orlando Sentinel, The Sun Sentinel of Florida, The San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register, and The St. Paul Pioneer Press.
OpenAI responded to the allegations by emphasizing its commitment to supporting news organizations and highlighted its partnerships with various media outlets worldwide, including The Associated Press, Financial Times, Germany’s Axel Springer, French daily Le Monde, and Spanish conglomerate Prisa Media.
This legal action closely mirrors a previous lawsuit filed by The New York Times in December, where OpenAI faced similar accusations of content appropriation for training its AI models.
In that case, OpenAI defended its practices, arguing that using publicly available data, including news articles, for general training purposes constitutes fair use.
