Sept 4 (Reuters) - The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday, alleging in federal court that the tech companies copied the newspapers' journalism without permission to train their AI systems.
• The suit in the U.S. 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.
• 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.
• An 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.
• 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."
• 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.
• 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. 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.
(Reporting by Rishabh Jaiswal in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Natalia Bueno Rebolledo in Mexico City; Editing by William Mallard)