Overview
- The coalition filed a federal class-action complaint on June 24 in the Southern District of New York seeking damages, disgorgement and injunctive relief for alleged unauthorized use of their journalism.
- Plaintiffs say more than 20 publisher companies representing nearly 400 local outlets nationwide were scraped for paywalled articles that fed large training datasets such as Common Crawl.
- The suit alleges defendants copied reporting and stripped copyright-management information like author bylines and terms of use, raising claims under the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
- OpenAI has responded that it trains on publicly available data and relies on fair use while Microsoft has been named because of its investment and computing infrastructure ties.
- Lead counsel Matthew J. Platkin frames the case as seeking fair compensation for local newsrooms, and the complaint joins earlier lawsuits by outlets such as The New York Times and The Intercept that could push the industry toward paid licensing or tighter limits on training data.