Two More Newsrooms Join Copyright Battle Against OpenAI and Microsoft

Publishers Escalate Legal Pressure

Seattle Times and Newsday have filed copyright infringement claims against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies ingested their journalism without authorization to train generative AI systems. The complaint centers on two core assertions: that OpenAI scraped copyrighted articles to build its language models, and that those models now reproduce substantial portions of the outlets' reporting when users submit queries.

The lawsuit names Microsoft as a co-defendant because Copilot, the tech giant's consumer-facing AI assistant, relies on OpenAI's underlying architecture. That structural relationship has made Microsoft a frequent target in these disputes, even when the alleged infringement occurred during model pre-training rather than at the inference stage.

A Pattern Emerging Across the Industry

This is not an isolated action. The two regional outlets join a roster that already includes The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster, and Encyclopedia Britannica - all of which have filed their own complaints against OpenAI in recent months. Beyond these high-profile plaintiffs, nearly 400 local newspapers have banded together in a separate suit targeting the same defendants, underscoring how widespread the grievance has become among publishers of every scale.

At DailyTechWire, we've tracked the legal strategy as it has evolved from individual complaints to coordinated, multi-plaintiff actions. The common thread is a business-model concern: publishers argue that AI systems extract value from their journalism while routing readers away from the original sites, eroding both traffic and the subscription or advertising revenue that sustains newsrooms.

What the Plaintiffs Claim

The core allegations mirror those in earlier cases. First, that OpenAI's web-crawling infrastructure harvested copyrighted text at scale, often ignoring robots.txt exclusions or paywalls. Second, that the resulting models can generate outputs that closely paraphrase or even quote verbatim from protected works, effectively competing with the original articles in search results or conversational interfaces.

Publishers contend this crosses the line from fair use into commercial exploitation. They point to instances where a user prompt returns several paragraphs of reporting that would otherwise require a subscription to access, and they argue that no licensing agreement was ever negotiated or compensation paid.

OpenAI has consistently maintained that training on publicly accessible web data falls within the bounds of fair use under U.S. copyright law, a position the company has defended in multiple venues. Microsoft has echoed that stance, emphasizing that Copilot's outputs are transformative and that the technology creates new utility rather than serving as a substitute for the original content.

The Stakes for Regional Journalism

Seattle Times and Newsday represent a different segment of the media landscape than the Times or Britannica. Both are regional institutions - Seattle Times serves the Pacific Northwest, while Newsday covers Long Island and the New York suburbs - and both have faced the same structural headwinds that have hollowed out local news over the past two decades: declining print circulation, narrower advertising markets, and rising production costs.

For these outlets, the lawsuit is as much about survival as principle. If AI systems can surface the essence of a breaking story or investigative series without sending a reader to the publisher's site, the already-fragile economics of regional journalism become even more precarious. The complaint implicitly asks courts to draw a boundary around journalistic labor, asserting that the effort and expense of original reporting cannot be appropriated without consent simply because it appears on the open web.

Microsoft's Deepening Exposure

Microsoft's inclusion as a defendant highlights the company's strategic bet on OpenAI. Since 2019, Microsoft has invested more than ten billion dollars in the startup and woven its models into Azure, Office, GitHub, and Bing. That integration has delivered competitive advantage - Copilot has become a flagship productivity feature - but it has also extended Microsoft's legal surface area.

Every lawsuit that names OpenAI now routinely adds Microsoft, on the theory that the partnership makes the Redmond giant jointly liable for any infringement baked into the training corpus. Microsoft has so far shown no sign of retreating from the relationship, but the accumulating litigation does create reputational and financial risk, particularly if a court were to issue an injunction or award substantial damages.

What Happens Next

The Seattle Times and Newsday case will likely follow the procedural path already laid out by earlier plaintiffs: discovery battles over training datasets, motions to dismiss on fair-use grounds, and eventually either settlement talks or a trial that could set precedent for the entire generative-AI industry. Because these cases involve similar facts and overlapping defendants, courts may eventually consolidate them or look to one as a bellwether.

For now, the lawsuits serve a dual function. They apply financial and legal pressure on OpenAI and Microsoft, and they signal to the broader tech ecosystem that publishers are not prepared to cede their intellectual property without a fight. Whether that fight ends in courtroom defeat, negotiated licenses, or new legislation remains an open question - but the tempo of filings suggests the conflict is far from over.