The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC v OpenAI Inc et al
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The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC v OpenAI Inc et al is a copyright, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and trademark action filed on September 4, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.[1]
Background
The publishers allege that OpenAI and Microsoft copied their journalism without permission or compensation by scraping their websites, bypassing paywalls, and incorporating articles into datasets used to train, fine-tune, and ground generative-AI products.[1] The complaint alleges that those products can reproduce or closely paraphrase the publishers’ work and compete with the original reporting.[1]
The complaint includes an example in which ChatGPT allegedly produced an 88-word verbatim passage from The Seattle Times’ Pulitzer-winning Boeing 737 MAX coverage after receiving the article’s headline and URL.[1]
Claims
The publishers assert direct and vicarious copyright infringement, violations of the DMCA’s copyright-management-information provisions, federal trademark dilution, and related Washington and New York trademark-dilution claims.[1] They seek damages, injunctive relief, and the impoundment or destruction of copies, training datasets, and language models incorporating their works or derivatives.[1]
Procedural History
The complaint was filed on September 4, 2026, and demands a jury trial.[1]
Significance
The action adds two regional news publishers to the group challenging the use of journalism in generative-AI training and output generation.[1]