News/Media Alliance files amicus brief backing publishers against OpenAI and Microsoft

What happened

The News/Media Alliance filed an amicus brief on October 30, 2026, in support of the news publishers suing OpenAI and Microsoft in the consolidated copyright case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation). The Alliance is joined by cosigners National Newspaper Association, the National Press Photographers Association, and ProPublica. The brief urges the court to side with the publishers at the summary-judgment phase, where Judge Sidney Stein can resolve questions of infringement and fair use.

The argument

The brief argues OpenAI and Microsoft's uses of news content are highly substitutive for news publishing and insufficiently transformative to support fair use: ChatGPT gives summaries or verbatim copies that remove the need to visit original publisher sites, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) answers serve the same purpose as the original journalism. It cites research showing ChatGPT sends 96% less referral traffic to publishers than traditional Google search, lowering ad and subscription revenue, and argues a finding of fair use would eviscerate the well-established and growing market for licensing news content to AI companies.

Context

This is a legal argument, not a ruling; the court has not decided the summary-judgment motions. It is distinct from the other October 30 amicus filings already published (Wikimedia Foundation, Human Consent Foundation coalition, AAP/STM/IBPA/CCC publishers, House Judiciary Democrats, Open Markets Institute, Authors Alliance, Copyright Alliance, Public Knowledge, Matthew Sag, conservative groups): the News/Media Alliance is a separate filer, and its brief centers on news publishers' substitution and licensing-market harm, including RAG answers.