Microsoft and OpenAI have been hauled into court again, and this time the plaintiffs are a group of local news media that usually stay out of the spotlight. Led by Emmerich Newspapers of Mississippi, multiple U.S. local news organizations recently filed a complaint in court, alleging that the two tech giants have, over a long period and systematically, stuffed tens of thousands of copyrighted news articles into large-model training pipelines without authorization and without paying any compensation, and have earned enormous commercial value from these AI products, while the providers of the original content have not seen a single cent.
This lawsuit is not an isolated case. In recent years, similar tension has never dissipated: major outlets such as The New York Times have long since sued Microsoft and OpenAI on the same grounds. But the involvement of local media extends the battle lines from top national newspapers all the way down to community newspapers. The plaintiffs put it bluntly in their complaint: Microsoft and OpenAI have created, and will continue to create, billions of dollars in revenue, while content producers "have not received a penny"; more striking still, some articles that were originally behind paywalls and access barriers were also allegedly circumvented and taken for training.
The most technically detailed points of the lawsuit concern copyright marks. The plaintiffs point out that the articles in question originally embedded copyright management information—author bylines, publisher names, copyright notices, terms of use—which serve as the works' identity cards. They allege that Microsoft and OpenAI stripped away these marks before feeding the content into training, as if the works' attribution were quietly torn out of a family photo album. Another piece of evidence comes from the output side: the plaintiffs claim that their news content has, over the past few years, been repeatedly regurgitated by AI systems in near-verbatim fashion, which in turn proves that those materials were long ago swallowed deep into the models' guts.
For local media, this is not just a copyright matter but a matter of survival. U.S. local newspapers have long been squeezed by declining print circulation and shrinking advertising, and AI, which can hand answers directly to users, has further drained their already thinning traffic. The plaintiffs therefore call the tech companies' conduct "the death knell of local journalism"—in many of the markets they serve, Emmerich Newspapers is the only local news source, and if such media are forced to shrink or even shut down, the information channel for neighbors will be cut off directly. Joining Emmerich in this joint lawsuit are Ojai Media and multiple publishing and media companies under Coopwood, all of them independent newspaper and magazine publishers.
On the legal level, the plaintiffs argue that the two companies have violated the U.S. Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), constituting copyright infringement and related violations. The complaint also highlights a glaring double standard: Microsoft and OpenAI are accused of ignoring publishers' copyrights while aggressively protecting their own code, models, and systems through licensing agreements, paid services, and legal means; the plaintiffs even dredge up recent history—OpenAI once publicly complained that competitors used content it generated to train models, harming its own interests, a stance that stands in pointed contrast to the conduct it is now accused of.
The local media's demands are clear: they want the court to award damages and compensation, and above all an injunction forcing Microsoft and OpenAI to completely remove all content involving the plaintiffs' copyrighted works from their model training data. As more and more news organizations, publishers, and content creators take up legal weapons, whether AI training data is lawful at all, and under what mechanism content should be licensed and compensated, is firmly taking the top spot among the most closely watched legal issues in the global AI industry.