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Industrymedium signal

The Seattle Times and Newsday ask a court to destroy the models trained on their journalism

Two American newspapers filed a copyright complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft in Manhattan federal court on September 4, 2026. The filing runs to 38 pages and seven counts. Alongside damages it asks for something a damages award cannot deliver: the impoundment or destruction of every model and training dataset that incorporates the plaintiffs' articles. Nothing has been decided, so every number in the document is one side's allegation. What makes it worth reading is the evidence the two papers say they already hold.

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An illustration of the Copilot logo
Industrystrong signal

Microsoft's summary judgment brief puts numbers on how rarely Copilot repeats news text

Microsoft moved for summary judgment on September 4, 2026 in the consolidated copyright case brought by The New York Times, the Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Part of its fair use argument rests on 8.2 million Copilot chat logs handed over in discovery. The plaintiffs' own expert found a 16-word match in 59,545 of those conversations, which Microsoft's expert reports as 0.73% of the sample. The brief also restates something a site owner can act on today: two meta tags that keep a page out of Copilot's web grounding.

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IN RE OPENAI20 pagesthe United States argues that training is fair
Industrystrong signal

The United States told a federal court that training a language model on copyrighted text is fair use

The Department of Justice filed a 20-page Statement of Interest on September 1, 2026 in the consolidated OpenAI copyright litigation in the Southern District of New York. It asks the court to reject the argument that training large language models on copyrighted texts infringes copyright, and says the fourth fair-use factor, the effect on the market, heavily favors fair use. Its most concrete argument is economic: a licensing requirement would leave only the largest technology companies able to pay. A footnote then states that the government takes no position on whether such a licensing regime would be workable at all.

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