Rothwell Figg Brings Third High-Profile Copyright Suit Against OpenAI and Microsoft, Representing Nine News Outlets Nationwide

11.26.25

Rothwell Figg has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York on behalf of nine leading news organizations from across the United States including the Virginian-Pilot, Los Angeles Daily News, Hartford Courant, California Newspapers Partnership, Prairie Mountain Publishing Co., The Boston Herald, The Daily Press, The Morning Call, and The San Diego Union-Tribune. The complaint alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft unlawfully used the publishers’ copyrighted content to train their generative AI products. This marks the firm’s third lawsuit of this kind, following actions brought on behalf of The New York Times and a group of eight prominent newspapers.

The suit joins “the long list of publishers and authors who have filed lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft, and other AI companies,” and seeks more than $10 billion in damages. According to the complaint, the defendants “created and distributed reproductions of the [news outlets’] Works in several, independent ways in the course of training their LLMs and operating the products that incorporate them.” Despite clear copyright notices and links to terms of service on the publishers’ websites, OpenAI and Microsoft “intentionally removed the Publishers’ CMI (copyright management information) from the Publishers’ Works in the process of scraping the Publishers’ Works from the Publishers’ websites, storing the Publishers’ Works in training datasets, using the Publishers’ Works to train the GenAI products and/or in distributing unauthorized copies of the Publishers’ Works through the operation of Defendants’ GenAI products.”

Microsoft and OpenAI’s conduct “has caused, and will continue to cause, substantial harm to Publishers,” who depend heavily on subscription-based business models. Meanwhile, “OpenAI’s commercial success is built in large part on its large-scale copyright infringement” and “the financial benefit to Defendants from their unlawful conduct has been monumental.”

The Rothwell Figg team representing the news outlets includes Steven Lieberman, Jennifer Maisel, Robert Parker, Jenny Colgate, Kristen Logan, Bryan Thompson, and Alexandra Hughes.

You can find additional information on the case through the following articles: