Seattle Times and Newsday copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft stayed pending MDL summary judgment rulings

What happened

The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC filed a seven-count complaint on 4 September 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (No. 1:26-cv-07644) against nine OpenAI entities and Microsoft Corporation, alleging the defendants scraped and trained on their articles, removed copyright management information, reproduce their content in outputs, and diluted their trademarks. The complaint was refiled on 8 September 2026 after a clerk's notice that the first filing was unsigned. On 9 September the clerk accepted the case as related to In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, No. 1:25-md-03143, and reassigned it from Judge Jed S. Rakoff to Judge Sidney H. Stein, with Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang.

The stay

On 15 September 2026 Judge Stein ordered the plaintiffs to show cause why the case should not be stayed pending resolution of summary judgment motions in the other active MDL cases. The parties then stipulated to the stay, and Judge Stein so-ordered it on 28 September 2026. The stipulation calls for a joint status report within 30 days of rulings on those motions and lets any party move to lift the stay for good cause. Executed waivers of service were filed on 29 September 2026.

What the complaint alleges

The complaint alleges, on information and belief, that the defendants obtained copies of the plaintiffs' articles by scraping their websites with automated bots and bypassing paywalls, incorporated them into training datasets including ones derived from WebText, WebText2, Common Crawl and Microsoft's Bing search index, and used them to train, fine-tune and ground the models behind ChatGPT, Copilot and Bing Chat. It alleges the models memorised the material and reproduce articles verbatim or in close paraphrase — as one example, a model reproduced 88 consecutive words of a Seattle Times article when prompted with its headline and URL — and that the products hallucinate content attributed to the plaintiffs. Counts include copyright infringement, vicarious infringement, CMI removal and distribution, and federal and state trademark dilution. The prayer seeks statutory damages, a permanent injunction, and impoundment or destruction of copies of the works and of LLMs and training datasets incorporating them.

Status and context

These are allegations in a complaint; no court has ruled on them, and the case is stayed. An earlier item in the system covers the filing itself (September 2026); this item records the new development, the 28 September stay and the reassignment to Judge Stein.