Seattle Newspapers Sue OpenAI, Microsoft Over Copyrighted Content

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging copyright infringement. According to the suit, OpenAI and Microsoft scraped content from the newspapers' websites, including articles behind paywalls, to train their AI systems.

The companies' AI products, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's AI features, can reproduce passages from the newspapers' reporting, closely paraphrase articles, and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit the websites or buy subscriptions. The lawsuit states that this use of content without permission or compensation is a clear case of copyright infringement.

The Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees: 'We feel strongly that we must defend our content - which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce - from being used without our consent or compensation.'