The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a joint lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies illegally bypassed paywalls to scrape copyrighted journalism for AI training.

Key Points

• The lawsuit claims OpenAI and Microsoft methodically circumvented digital paywalls to harvest news content for generative AI model development.
• Plaintiffs allege the unauthorized use of their articles reduces website traffic and advertising revenue while causing AI models to hallucinate false information.
• The legal action joins ongoing litigation involving the New York Times and approximately 400 other local newspapers against the tech giants.
• The complaint highlights potential violations of the EU’s general-purpose AI code, which explicitly prohibits signatories from bypassing subscription-based access restrictions.
• Unlike the plaintiffs, other media organizations including the Associated Press and Vox Media have opted to license their archives to OpenAI.

Why it Matters

This litigation challenges the legal boundaries of fair use regarding how AI companies acquire training data from subscription-based digital publishers. The outcome could force a shift in how tech firms negotiate licensing agreements and comply with international copyright standards for web scraping.