26 local publishers file new copyright complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft, joining the MDL news coalition

On September 16, 2026, a complaint by some 160 regional, local and trade news publications, owned by 26 news publishers including Times Publishing Company (the Tampa Bay Times), the Austin Chronicle and Florida Trend, was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York (Case No. 1:26-cv-08082), accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of training their AI models on protected works without permission or compensation. The publishers, represented by Platkin LLP, allege the defendants "built some of the most valuable businesses in human history" on the backs of the plaintiff publishers, scraped and copied their journalism without compensation, and stripped copyright management information from the works. The complaint asserts direct copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. section 501) against Microsoft and the OpenAI entities, vicarious infringement (control and financial benefit theory) against Microsoft and five OpenAI entities, and DMCA section 1202(b) copyright-management-information removal against the OpenAI entities. Plaintiffs seek statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits and attorney's fees, plus an injunction under 17 U.S.C. section 503(b) requiring removal of all copies of the registered works from all GPT or other LLM models and training sets. The new complaint feeds into the centralized copyright MDL against OpenAI; reporting in October noted the plaintiff-publisher coalition had grown past 550 publishers.