8 daily newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over AI

The lawsuit, which accuses tech companies of copyright infringement, adds to the fight over online data used to power the artificial intelligence.

Eight daily newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Tuesday, accusing the tech companies of illegally using news articles to power their AI. chatbots.

Publications — The New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinel, The Sun Sentinel of Florida, The San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press filed the lawsuit in U.S. Southern District federal court in New York. All are owned by MediaNews Group or Tribune Publishing, subsidiaries of Alden, the country's second-largest newspaper operator.

In the complaint, the publications accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of copyrighted articles without permission to train and feed their generative AI. products, including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. The lawsuit does not seek specific monetary damages, but it does seek a jury trial and states that the publishers were owed compensation for use of the content.

The complaint indicates that chatbots routinely caused the full text of articles to appear behind subscription paywalls for users and often did not visibly link to the source. This, he said, reduced the need for readers to pay subscriptions to support local newspapers and deprived publishers of revenue from both subscriptions and licensing their content elsewhere.

"We have spent billions of dollars collecting information and reporting news in our publications, and we cannot allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand big tech's playbook of stealing our work to create their own businesses at our expense,” Frank Pine, editor overseeing Alden newspapers, said in a statement.

A spokeswoman. OpenAI said in a statement that the company "was not previously aware" of Alden's concerns but was engaged in partnerships and conversations with numerous news organizations to explore opportunities.

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