The complaint, filed by Platkin LLP as Times Publishing Company v. Microsoft Corporation, No. 1:26-cv-08082 in the Southern District of New York, names 26 publishers of local, regional and subject-focused outlets as plaintiffs and Microsoft and several OpenAI entities as defendants. The publishers allege the defendants crawled their websites, including content behind paywalls, copied their articles to train ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, and stripped author credits, publication names, copyright notices and terms of use from the copies. They allege the models memorised their content and likely reproduced it verbatim or nearly so, and that the conduct was willful, citing testimony the complaint attributes to Sam Altman before the House of Lords. Counts I and II, for direct and vicarious copyright infringement, are brought by Times Publishing Company alone on its registered works. Count III, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provision on removing copyright management information, is brought by all 26 plaintiffs against the OpenAI defendants. The publishers seek statutory and compensatory damages, a permanent injunction, and an order under 17 U.S.C. section 503(b) removing Times Publishing Company's registered works from GPT and other models and training sets. In India, ANI's copyright case against OpenAI remains before the Delhi High Court, with a Division Bench hearing listed for December 8, 2026.
26 Local News Publishers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Alleged AI Training Copyright Infringement
Twenty-six local and specialty news publishers filed a copyright complaint in a US federal court in New York on September 16 against Microsoft and OpenAI entities. They allege their articles, including paywalled content, were copied to train ChatGPT and Copilot, and that copyright management information was stripped. The allegations have not been tested in court.
Source: Complaint in Times Publishing Company v. Microsoft (S.D.N.Y. No. 1:26-cv-08082), September 16, 2026
Comments
0 commentsNo comments yet — be the first.