Seattle Times and Newsday are the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft

Two major regional American newspapers, The Seattle Times and Newsday, have filed a joint copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court against OpenAI and Microsoft.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses the two tech companies of "systematically and methodically" scraping millions of local, investigative, and Pulitzer Prize-winning articles without authorization or licensing fees to train their commercial generative models.

The lawsuit follows similar high-profile actions brought by *The New York Times*, *The Chicago Tribune*, and the Authors Guild.

According to court filings, OpenAI and Microsoft used automated scrapers to ingest decades of original reporting from SeattleTimes.com and Newsday.com into training datasets used to develop the GPT-4 family of models and Microsoft Copilot.

The complaint states:

"Defendants have built multibillion-dollar commercial empires by taking the valuable intellectual property of news publishers without permission or payment. When users query Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT about local events, politics, or investigations, the systems frequently return verbatim or near-verbatim excerpts of our reporting without directing traffic back to our publications."

The plaintiffs presented forensic prompt testing showing ChatGPT and Copilot outputting lengthy passages of paywalled investigative pieces behind local subscriber firewalls, effectively bypassing subscription gates.

While national outlets like *The New York Times* possess the legal war chests to wage protracted courtroom battles, regional papers operate on tighter margins.

Publishers argue that if generative AI answer engines absorb original local reporting and regurgitate the facts inside synthetic summaries, local journalism models will collapse:

• Organic Search Depletion: As generative answer engines synthesize summaries, referral traffic from Google Search and Bing to news publishers has declined between 15% and 35%.
• Licensing Inequality: While OpenAI has signed multimillion-dollar licensing pacts with Axel Springer, News Corp, and Condé Nast, smaller regional publications have largely been excluded from licensing negotiations.
• Fair Use Rejection: The publishers argue that commercial training of competing commercial products cannot qualify as transformative fair use under existing U.S. copyright statutes.

Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft has filed a formal response in court yet, though spokespeople previously stated that model training on publicly available web content represents fair use supported by judicial precedent.

If the courts reject the fair use defense in these consolidated publisher cases, AI providers could face statutory damages running into billions of dollars or be forced to negotiate mandatory licensing frameworks with news coalitions worldwide.

Reporting continues on GeekWire and Engadget.