Times Publishing and 25 other local news publishers sue Microsoft and OpenAI entities over alleged article copying

The complaint

Times Publishing Company et al. v. Microsoft Corporation et al., No. 1:26-cv-08082 (S.D.N.Y.), is a 52-page complaint filed September 16, 2026, ECF No. 1, with a jury demand and three exhibits: Times Publishing Company's copyright registrations (Exhibit A), a token count by domain (Exhibit B), and examples of copyright management information stripping (Exhibit C). The defendants are Microsoft Corporation; OpenAI, Inc.; OpenAI LP; OpenAI GP, LLC; OpenAI, LLC; OpenAI OpCo, LLC; OpenAI Global, LLC; OAI Corporation, LLC; OpenAI Holdings, LLC; OpenAI Foundation; and OpenAI Group PBC.

The publishers

The plaintiffs on the original complaint are Times Publishing Company, which publishes the Tampa Bay Times; Alternative Newsweekly Foundation; Austin Chronicle Corp.; Boston Neighborhood News, Inc.; Cape Gazette, Ltd.; Chapman Hyperlocal Media, Inc.; Conrad Communications, LLC; Contemporary Media, Inc.; East Greenwich News; ecoRI Inc.; Florida Trend Magazines, Inc.; HD Media Company, LLC; Massachusetts Media Fund, Inc.; New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism; Noisy Creek, Inc.; Richland Times, LLC; San Francisco Jewish Community Publications, Inc.; SwimSwam Partners, LLC; TAP IP, LLC; The Alternative Press, LLC; The Calais Advertiser, Inc.; The Hudson Valley Local News Lab Inc.; The Jewish Link of Bergen County and Northern NJ, LLC; The Machias Valley News Observer, Inc.; Tucson Investigative Reporting Center Inc.; and We-Ha.com LLC. On September 18, 2026 the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint, ECF No. 10, which the docket lists with Inland Publications, Inc. as an additional plaintiff. The amended complaint is not available.

What it alleges

The complaint alleges that the defendants used automated systems to crawl the publishers' websites, including content behind paywalls and other access restrictions, copied their articles without authorization, and stripped copyright management information such as author credits, publication names, copyright notices, and terms of use. It alleges the content was used to train the large language models behind ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, that the models memorized the material, and that the copying continues. It alleges that an analysis of the Common Crawl dataset used to train GPT-3 points to hundreds of thousands of the publishers' articles and tens of millions of tokens of their content in that dataset.

Counts and relief

Count I, by Times Publishing Company against all defendants, pleads copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501 based on its registered works. Count II, by Times Publishing Company, pleads vicarious copyright infringement against Microsoft, OpenAI, Inc., OpenAI GP, OpenAI LP, OAI Corporation, LLC, OpenAI Holdings, LLC, OpenAI Global, LLC, and OpenAI Group PBC. Count III, by all plaintiffs against the OpenAI defendants, pleads removal of copyright management information under 17 U.S.C. § 1202. The prayer seeks statutory damages, including willful infringement damages, compensatory damages, restitution, and disgorgement; a permanent injunction; an injunction under 17 U.S.C. § 503(b) requiring removal of Times Publishing Company's registered works from all GPT or other LLM models and training sets; and costs, expenses, and attorney's fees.

On the docket

The plaintiffs filed a statement of relatedness to No. 1:25-md-03143 with the complaint. On September 18, 2026 the clerk accepted the case as related, associated it with In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, No. 1:25-md-03143, and reassigned it to Judge Sidney H. Stein, with Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang designated. The docket now also carries filings made in the MDL for all cases, including late-October and early-November motions for leave to file amicus briefs on the pending summary judgment motions in the MDL.