April 30 (UPI) — Eight major U.S. newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune and The New York Daily News, are suing OpenAI and Microsoft over what it says is copyright infringement for using their articles to train artificial intelligence.
Alden Global Capital, which owns the eight newspapers, filed a federal complaint Tuesday in the U.S. Southern District of New York, months after the New York Times filed a similar lawsuit.
The newspapers accuse the tech companies of “purloining millions of the publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment” to commercialize OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot. They also claim the companies failed to link to original content and removed journalists’ names from their works.
“We’ve spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news at our publications and 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,” Frank Pine, executive editor for MediaNewsGroup and Tribune Publishing, said in a statement.
“They don’t want to pay for the content without which they would have no product at all. That’s not fair use, and it’s not fair,” Pine added. “It needs to stop.”
Alden is the nation’s second-largest newspaper publisher with The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, The Orlando Sentinel, The Sun Sentinel of Florida, The San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register and The St. Paul Pioneer Press.
The New York Times was the first to sue Microsoft and OpenAI in December, for creating what the newspaper called a business model based on mass copyright infringement. According to The Times’ lawsuit, both companies trained their artificial intelligence to “rely on large-language models that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’ copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides and more.”
As The Times and Alden sue tech companies over copyright violations for using their articles, other news publishers — including the Financial Times — are negotiating deals to get paid millions of dollars a year.
The Times, instead, is suing for billions of dollars in damages. Alden newspapers, which is demanding a jury trial, is seeking unspecified monetary damages for content licensing and lost revenue from ads and subscriptions.
“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 purloined content and delivering it to their users,” Pine said.
“Even worse, when they’re not delivering the actual verbatim reporting of our hard-working journalists, they misattribute bogus information to our news publications, damaging our credibility.”
