Microsoft and OpenAI face copyright lawsuit from 400 publishers

A coalition of nearly 400 newspaper publishers just filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging the companies helped themselves to hundreds of thousands of copyrighted articles to train AI systems like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. The case landed in the Southern District of New York on June 24.

What the lawsuit actually claims

The case, formally titled Richner Communications, Inc. et al. v. Microsoft Corp. et al., is led by Long Island-based Richner Communications. The legal team is headed by Platkin LLP, a firm founded by former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin.

The plaintiffs are asserting claims of both direct and vicarious copyright infringement under the US Copyright Act. They’re saying Microsoft and OpenAI didn’t just passively benefit from copyrighted content, they actively scraped it, stripped out copyright management information like author bylines, and used it commercially without ever reaching for the checkbook.

The publishers want statutory damages, actual damages, disgorgement of profits, attorneys’ fees, and injunctive relief that would block further unauthorized use of their work.

OpenAI’s position is that its models rely on publicly available data and that such use falls under fair use protections. Microsoft has not commented publicly on the lawsuit.

A pattern, not an outlier

The New York Times filed its own lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI previously, making similar allegations about unauthorized use of its journalism. Other media companies and individual creators have brought comparable claims.

The lawsuit explicitly highlights how AI-generated outputs may undermine original journalism. The argument is straightforward: if an AI can summarize or reproduce the substance of a local news article, why would anyone click through to the original?

What this means for investors

The injunctive relief aspect deserves particular attention. Monetary damages, however large, can be budgeted for by companies the size of Microsoft. But a court order requiring AI companies to stop using certain categories of training data, or to retroactively remove its influence from existing models, would pose genuine operational challenges.

For the crypto and Web3 space, these lawsuits carry a different kind of signal. Decentralized AI projects and blockchain-based content attribution systems have long positioned themselves as solutions to exactly this problem: transparent, permissionless tracking of content usage and automated creator compensation.

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