Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright

Two more big names in the courtroom

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The core of the dispute is the accusation that both tech companies used their journalism without permission to train their AI models. According to the publishers, models like ChatGPT or Copilot routinely reproduce entire passages from their articles in response to user queries.

Direct answers instead of links

This ability to generate complete answers instead of links is the publishers' main argument. They are taking the side of The New York Times and nearly four hundred local newspapers, arguing the economic impact. When an AI answers directly on the chat page, the user has no reason to click through to the original source. This reduces traffic to newspapers and consequently hurts crucial subscription revenue.

Data must be destroyed, not just paid for

The lawsuit goes beyond demanding financial compensation. The Seattle Times and Newsday explicitly ask the court to order the destruction of any copies of their works held by OpenAI and Microsoft. This destruction demand also extends to the training datasets and the AI models built upon that data.

Courts will set the rules

The cases brought by The New York Times, Ziff Davis, and now these two newspapers show that publishing houses are not all willing to play OpenAI's game of voluntary licensing agreements (as News Corp or Axel Springer have done). The court decisions in these cases will set a precedent for whether mass scraping of copyrighted content for AI training is truly "fair use" or a massive copyright infringement. The outcome will determine the foundational economics of future models.

Lilith's verdict

Media houses have realized it's better to burn bridges in the courtroom now than let themselves be cut out of the distribution chain forever.