Eight newspapers sued Microsoft and OpenAI on Tuesday, claiming the technology giants illegally harvested millions of copyrighted articles to create their cutting-edge “generative” artificial intelligence products including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.
While the newspapers’ publishers have spent billions of dollars to send “real people to real places to report on real events in the real world,” the two tech firms are “purloining” the papers’ reporting without compensation “to create products that provide news and information plagiarized and stolen,” according to the lawsuit in federal court.
“We can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense,” said Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, which own seven of the newspapers. “The misappropriation of news content by OpenAI and Microsoft undermines the business model for news. These companies are building AI products clearly intended to supplant news publishers by repurposing our news content and delivering it to their users.”
The lawsuit was filed Tuesday morning in the Southern District of New York on behalf of the MediaNews Group-owned San Jose Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer-Press; Tribune Publishing’s Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel; and the New York Daily News.
Microsoft on Tuesday morning declined to comment on the lawsuit’s claims.
OpenAI said Tuesday morning it takes “great care” to support news companies.