Story perspectives

Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft over paywall scraping

9/6/2026

Summary

Story summary

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging they scraped paywalled articles for AI training.
The complaint, filed on September 4 2026, cites a 47 percent decline in midsize publishers’ search traffic in December 2025.
Plaintiffs seek damages and a court order to destroy the training datasets and models.
They also allege trademark dilution from AI-generated fabricated articles falsely bearing their names.
Microsoft said it was surprised and will discuss solutions.

History

Historical Context

In 2005 the Authors Guild sued Google over its Book Search project, alleging copyright infringement. After the $125 million settlement proposed in 2008 was rejected, the Second Circuit affirmed in October 2015 that Google’s mass scanning qualified as fair use. That precedent now underpins Seattle Times and Newsday’s claims that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped paywalled articles without permission.

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Story summary

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging they scraped paywalled articles for AI training.
The complaint, filed on September 4 2026, cites a 47 percent decline in midsize publishers’ search traffic in December 2025.
Plaintiffs seek damages and a court order to destroy the training datasets and models.
They also allege trademark dilution from AI-generated fabricated articles falsely bearing their names.
Microsoft said it was surprised and will discuss solutions.

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