Nine newspapers owned or managed by MediaNews Group filed a civil lawsuit Wednesday, Nov. 26 against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the tech giants of violating copyright law by stealing the news publishers’ content to build and operate the large language models that power their artificial intelligence applications.
The newspapers are the Los Angeles Daily News, The San Diego Union-Tribune, San Bernardino Sun, Boston Herald, Hartford Courant, The Morning Call, the Boulder Daily Camera, the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot.
The plaintiffs in the 119-page complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said they are seeking “in excess of $10 billion” in damages.
“OpenAI pays for its chips. It pays for its computers. It pays its programmers. But it steals the raw material for its GAI products — valuable well-written content — from hard-working journalists without payment and without permission,” said Steven Lieberman, an attorney with the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Rothwell Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, who is representing the newspapers in the case. “Through this lawsuit, the news plaintiffs seek to make OpenAI pay for what it has taken.”
Spokespersons with OpenAi and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Lieberman also represents eight other publications owned or managed by MNG that filed a similar lawsuit in April 2024 against OpenAI and Microsoft, also in the Southern District of New York. That case is proceeding on a separate track.
In the older case, the plaintiffs include the MNG-owned Orange County Register, Mercury News, Denver Post, and St. Paul Pioneer-Press, and Tribune Publishing’s Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel and the New York Daily News.
“Not only have these companies built their multibillion-dollar AI products on the theft of our journalism, but now they are stealing our audience and undermining our business,” Frank Pine, MNG’s executive editor, said of Wednesday’s lawsuit. “One of the most fundamental responsibilities of the Fourth Estate is to hold the powerful to account and to seek justice. This lawsuit does just that.”
In the 2024 case, OpenAI is challenging a court order that would require it to turn over 20 million output logs the publishers are seeking in order to determine how much of their content OpenAI serves to its users.
In a separate case filed by the Authors Guild and a long list of best-selling authors, Manhattan Federal Court Magistrate Judge Ona Wang ruled this week that OpenAI needs to turn over all its internal communications with lawyers about why it deleted troves of pirated books from a “shadow library” that the tech company is accused of using to train ChatGPT, according to a New York Daily News report.
In that case, book publishers allege large-scale copyright infringement of their articles without permission or payment, to fuel the commercialization of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot artificial intelligence products.
The newspapers in their suit claim the technology giants illegally harvested millions of copyrighted articles to create their cutting-edge “generative” artificial intelligence products.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to nine total newspapers suing OpenAI and Microsoft. The ninth paper is the San Bernardino Sun.
