{"id":8586,"date":"2026-09-06T19:37:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T19:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=8586"},"modified":"2026-09-06T19:37:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T19:37:09","slug":"daily-news-ny-times-want-fair-use-argument-rejected-in-copyright-case-against-openai-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=8586","title":{"rendered":"Daily News, NY Times want \u2018fair use\u2019 argument rejected in copyright case against OpenAI, Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div>\n<p>A Manhattan judge overseeing\u00a0against Microsoft and OpenAI received dueling summary judgment motions Friday, with news organizations including the Daily News and The New York Times calling on the court to reject a key pillar of the tech behemoths\u2019 defense to the claim that they are pirating original reporting.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=8584\">Word Game: September 6, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n<p>In their motion, the news organizations requested that Manhattan Federal Judge Sidney Stein resolve several core issues in the complex lawsuit before it goes to trial, asking for a determination that neither Microsoft nor OpenAI employed \u201cfair use\u201d of their reporting at any stage of the A.I. pipeline, including when acquiring articles behind paywalls and training large language models, or LLMs, on the copied work.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cResolution of these issues for plaintiffs as a matter of law will streamline this case for trial and, by rejecting defendants\u2019 efforts to recast free riding as fair use, recognize that the future not just of journalism but of responsible AI too depends on preserving incentives for humans to produce the creative works on which a healthy society depends,\u201d lawyers for the news organizations wrote.<\/p>\n<p>The news outlets are slated to urge the court to unseal heavily redacted portions of their motions in the coming weeks relating to admissions by Microsoft executives they say undercut the company\u2019s defenses.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe stuff that we were forced to file under seal because Microsoft and OpenAI had designated them as confidential is scorchingly hot,\u201d said Steven Lieberman, the attorney leading The News\u2019 representation in the case.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNot just a smoking gun; they\u2019re a smoking bazooka.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The news organizations have separately sought sanctions in the ongoing suit against OpenAI. In a July motion Stein has yet to rule on, they accused the A.I. company of destroying evidence and concealing its ability to locate stolen news stories in training data and in responses to ChatGPT users. The news organizations\u2019 motions for summary judgment are more focused on Microsoft pending the outcome of the sanctions motion.<\/p>\n<p>In OpenAI\u2019s motion, the company\u2019s lawyers denied its chatbots regurgitate news articles verbatim and said newspapers don\u2019t own the facts they gather in the reporting process.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201cNobody owns facts, just as nobody owns language, grammar, or style,\u201d OpenAI\u2019s brief read.\u00a0 \u201cThose who expend sweat or shoe-leather to report the facts do not gain a monopoly on the truths they report \u2026 These technologies put the world\u2019s facts within reach of anyone who asks, in whatever form is most useful to them. That is progress, and copyright law does not stand in its way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In their court papers, Microsoft, whose A.I. knowledge assistant, Copilot, was built around OpenAI\u2019s GPT models, asked for summary judgment on all copyright claims challenging LLM training and web grounding, which pairs the chatbot with internet search capabilities, enabling Copilot \u201cto locate, synthesize, and contextualize information in responding to user queries.\u201d Microsoft contended that training its models with human-produced journalism amounts to a \u201ctransformative\u201d use of the material, protected under the \u201cfair use\u201d legal doctrine.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=8583\">Los Gatos: Military jet flyover scheduled in remembrance of 9\/11<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cMicrosoft has deep respect for the critical role News Plaintiffs have long served in our public discourse, and Microsoft has partnered with news organizations to safeguard local and national journalism,\u201d the tech giant\u2019s lawyers wrote. \u201cBut copyright law does not give News Plaintiffs the right to block transformative new technologies that do not replace their protected expression.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Microsoft filing denied that Copilot users use it to learn about news or current events.<\/p>\n<div>\n<\/div>\n<p>OpenAI, however, has acknowledged in the ongoing Manhattan litigation that a large chunk of\u00a0its\u00a0users go to it for their news, a trend news organizations say has drastically impacted website traffic and subscriptions that fund reporters\u2019 salaries and news gathering. More than one billion people use OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, according to figures released in June by the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.<\/p>\n<p>Challenging the tech companies\u2019 \u201cfair use\u201d claims, the news organizations also counter that A.I. bots don\u2019t always handle the reporting responsibly, frequently churning out distorted facts in content that resembles news, \u201cbut in fact contains inaccurate information about current events\u2014a phenomenon potentially even more harmful to the market for news.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The newspapers\u2019 Friday motion says OpenAI and Microsoft\u2019s products have led to a tsunami of \u201cpink slime\u201d news sites that plagiarize or remix content from legitimate news sources. Human-produced reporting is expensive, but under OpenAI\u2019s pricing, the suit details that it would only cost around $6,800 to generate 1 million news-style articles averaging 500 words each without employing a single human author, editor, or reporter.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDefendants pay for the chips they use in their factories. They pay for the computers they use. They pay for their electricity. They pay for their buildings. And they contend that their code is proprietary and competitors copy it. That is piracy,\u201d Lieberman said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut they seem to think that it is somehow OK for them to take the content produced by hard-working journalists without consent or compensation. It is not. This is what we are asking the court to decide.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=8581\">\u2018Spider-Man: Brand New Day\u2019 makes it 6 weeks in a row at No. 1 as Hollywood wraps a banner summer<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The News reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The newspapers&#8217; Friday motion says OpenAI and Microsoft&#8217;s products have led to a tsunami of &#8220;pink slime&#8221; news sites that plagiarize or remix content from legitimate news sources.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Daily News, NY Times want \u2018fair use\u2019 argument rejected in copyright case against OpenAI, Microsoft - Next City Digest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=8586\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Daily News, NY Times want \u2018fair use\u2019 argument rejected in copyright case against OpenAI, Microsoft - Next City Digest\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The newspapers&#039; Friday motion says OpenAI and Microsoft&#039;s products have led to a tsunami of &quot;pink slime&quot; news sites that plagiarize or remix content from legitimate news sources.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=8586\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Next City Digest\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-06T19:37:09+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=8586#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=8586\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/13065d40d633843429ac57d4e5c06f9b\"},\"headline\":\"Daily News, NY Times want \u2018fair use\u2019 argument rejected in copyright case against OpenAI, Microsoft\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-06T19:37:09+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=8586\"},\"wordCount\":897,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=8586#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/71591678a5ddb63e8e2c5dd5762b36e1.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Business\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=8586#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=8586\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nextcitydigest.com\\\/?p=8586\",\"name\":\"Daily News, NY Times want \u2018fair use\u2019 argument rejected in copyright case against OpenAI, Microsoft - 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