The Straits Times World News
· collected 2026-09-06 · by The Straits Times
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit in federal court against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the two companies copied their journalism without permission to train their AI systems. The suit claims that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped content from the newspapers' websites, including articles behind paywalls, and incorporated it into datasets used for products like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. According to the lawsuit, the companies' AI products can reproduce passages from the newspapers' reporting and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions. The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking an order requiring OpenAI and Microsoft to destroy copies of their works and retrain their AI models.
Written by the local model on 2026-09-06,
using this article's own text rather than the other coverage of the
same event (that is the story summary below).
Story summary
Here's a summary of the news story:
President Donald Trump's Justice Department has sided with tech giant OpenAI in a court battle over the company's use of copyrighted material to train its artificial intelligence tools. The department argued that restricting OpenAI's access to intellectual property could harm the country's dominance in the AI industry and hinder scientific progress.
The lawsuit, which includes multiple media companies, including The Intercept, The New York Times, Seattle Times, and Newsday, alleges that OpenAI and its largest investor Microsoft scraped copyrighted content from news websites without permission to train their AI systems. The newspapers claim that this use of their content without compensation or consent reduces the need for users to visit their websites or subscribe to their services.
The Justice Department's filing argues that using copyrighted material for transformative purposes, such as training AI models, should be considered fair use under copyright law. This move has been criticized by litigating attorney Matt Topic, who represents The Intercept in its lawsuit, as being out of touch with the financial realities faced by media outlets.
Written for “OpenAI Copyright Lawsuit” on 2026-09-07,
grounded in this article and the 2 other(s) covering the same event.
Why this leaning score
This article does not take a side on a contested political
question, so it has no leaning score. That is an
answer rather than a gap: a match report or a rescue can be warmly
or critically written without being left or right, and scoring it
anyway is how approval of a subject gets recorded as a political
position.
No political leaning scored for article 5884 · logged 2026-09-06
Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement
NEW YORK -
asserted
Times → sue → infringement
The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Sept 4, alleging in federal court that the US tech companies copied the US newspapers’ journalism without permission to train their AI systems.
asserted
companies → sue → systems
The suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers’ websites, including content behind paywalls, and incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features.
asserted
OpenAI → allege → ChatGPT
The newspapers, based in Seattle and Long Island, New York, said the companies’ AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions.
“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,” Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, according to the newspaper.
uncertain
Fisco → base → newspaper
A spokesperson for San Francisco-based OpenAI said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, without commenting specifically on the lawsuit.
asserted
models → base → lawsuit
A spokesperson for Microsoft, based near Seattle in Washington state, said in an email: “While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of local journalism and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.”
asserted
we → base → dispute
The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking an order requiring the destruction of copies of their works as well as training datasets or AI models incorporating them.
asserted
Times → seek → them
The lawsuit echoes a case filed by the New York Times in 2023, which accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot.
asserted
which → echo → chatbot
The case is ongoing, and is one of dozens brought by copyright holders against tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta for what they say is misuse of their material to train AI systems.
asserted
they → bring → systems
