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NYT targets Microsoft
The New York Times filed a motion to amend its copyright complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft in a heavily redacted court filing Thursday, arguing that Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal NYT works by building a bespoke supercomputing system.
“"Today, we asked the court for permission to file an amended complaint”
The Times said the Supreme Court’s decision in a case where Sony tried and failed to claim that Cox was contributing to music piracy as an Internet service provider set a new standard for contributory infringement, and the Times sought to align its claim against Microsoft with that new standard.
Graham James, an NYT spokesperson, said in a statement provided to Ars, "Today, we asked the court for permission to file an amended complaint that further strengthens our case, clarifying our claim of contributory infringement against Microsoft based on new law and new evidence uncovered during discovery," while also noting the Times agreed to voluntarily dismiss two claims of contributory copyright infringement and trademark dilution against all defendants.
A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars that the company views the amended complaint as "a last-ditch effort by the plaintiff to save its claim from unfavorable precedent set in other recent rulings."
Publishers sue for scraping
Publishers that collectively own and operate nearly 400 newspapers sued generative artificial intelligence products made possible by the publishers’ work, filing a complaint in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York that alleges the defendants "systematically and secretly crawled" publishers’ websites and copied articles onto their own servers.
The complaint says the defendants used the copied works to train large language models, stripped out copyright management information from the works, and reproduced them in response to user prompts, and it warns that unless companies developing AI products are held accountable, the AI boom "will be a death knell for local journalism."
In the same dispute, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said in a statement, "Our models empower innovation, are trained on publicly available data, and are grounded in fair use," while a representative for Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bloomberg Law News also identified the case as Richner Commc’ns, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., S.D.N.Y., No. 1:26-cv-05320, with the complaint filed 6/24/26, and said the lawsuit is the latest in a wave that includes CNN, the New York Times, Reddit, and Merriam-Webster suing Perplexity.
Broader legal battle
The New York Times also accused Perplexity of repeatedly violating its copyright, saying in a demand filed in a federal court in New York that it had contact Perplexity several times during the last 18 months and that Perplexity continued using the material anyway.
“"se apropió de grandes fragmentos del contenido"”
The Times’ complaint described Perplexity as extracting information from a site or database and using it to generate text and respond to user queries, and it said this would not be a legitimate use because Perplexity "se apropió de grandes fragmentos del contenido" and in some cases provided complete articles.
Jesse Dwyer, director of communication of Perplexity, responded to The Times by telling the paper, "Afortunadamente, nunca ha funcionado, o todos estaríamos hablando de esto por teléfono," while the Times’ demand also alleged the motor invented information and falsely attributed it to The Times.
The broader fight includes other licensing and settlement moves, including a September agreement in which Anthropic agreed to pay 1.500 millones de dólares to authors and editoriales de libros after a judge ruled the company downloaded and stored illegally millions of books protected by copyright during development of its AI systems.
