Boone Newsmedia sues Microsoft and OpenAI over alleged paywalled-article scraping for AI training

What happened

On 30 October 2026, Boone Newsmedia, Inc. filed a 37-page complaint against Microsoft and OpenAI entities in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi (No. 3:26-cv-00950-DPJ-LGI, assigned to Judge Daniel P. Jordan III), seeking preliminary and permanent injunctive relief, damages for copyright infringement, and relief for violation of 17 U.S.C. 1202(b).

What the complaint alleges

Boone alleges, on information and belief, that it owns tens of thousands of copyrighted articles and registered copyrights, and that the defendants used automated systems to crawl Boone's websites, including content behind paywalls and other access restrictions, copied the articles onto their own servers without authorization, and stripped copyright management information such as author credits, publication names, copyright notices, and terms of use. It alleges the stripped content was used to train large language models for products including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, that the models memorized the material, and that the violations continue. It also alleges Microsoft invested at least $13 billion in OpenAI Global and contributed the cloud computing services used to copy Boone's works and train the models.

Status

These are allegations in a newly filed complaint, not findings by a court. The case is distinct from the consolidated New York MDL: it is a separate Southern District of Mississippi action by a local newspaper publisher.