United States District Court • Civil Action Docket

Newsroom Copyright Matrix: Seattle Times & Newsday v. OpenAI & Microsoft

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Filing Identity & Statutory Claims

SDNY Active Consolidation
Plaintiffs:The Seattle Times, Newsday LLC
Defendants:OpenAI Inc., Microsoft Corp.
Core Focus:Regional Pulitzer-winning investigative news, metro market subscriptions
Jurisdiction:U.S. District Court, Southern District of NY (SDNY)
Primary Legal Counts & Causes of Action
17 U.S.C. § 501 Direct Infringement High Exposure
Unauthorized ingestion and storage of full articles in massive corpus pre-training without publisher licensing.
17 U.S.C. § 1202(b) DMCA CMI Stripping Pleading Hurdle
Removal of author bylines, copyright notices, and terms of use from training data during tokenization.
Contributory & Vicarious Infringement Active Claim
Copilot and ChatGPT enterprise tools facilitating end-user bypass of paywalls and direct text regurgitation.
Common Law Unfair Competition Preemption Risk
Commercial misappropriation under NY common law; frequently targeted by defendants under § 301 preemption.
Evidentiary Ingestion & Synthesis Tier
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17 U.S.C. § 107 Fair Use Risk Engine

Judicial Risk: High
Plaintiff Infringement Exposure Probability
72%
Favors Plaintiffs: Transformative threshold weakened by direct market competition.
42
Commercial exploitation vs. functional transformation (Warhol v. Goldsmith threshold)
AI Transformative Commercial/Substitutive
Precedent: Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508 (2023)
68
Factual/historical reporting (thinner protection) vs. original creative expression
Raw Facts Creative Journalism
Precedent: Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, 499 U.S. 340 (1991)
55
Ingestion of entire digital archive vs. tiny snippet extraction in runtime inference
Statistical Echo 100% Corpus Duplication
Precedent: Authors Guild v. Google, Inc., 804 F.3d 202 (2d Cir. 2015)
84
Direct substitution for publisher subscriptions, licensing agreements, and ad click-throughs
Zero Harm Severe Cannibalization
Precedent: Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994)
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