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Times Publishing Company, publisher of the Tampa Bay Times, sued Microsoft and OpenAI entities in federal court on September 16, 2026. The complaint alleges that the companies copied publishers’ reporting to train AI products and removed copyright-management information. Those claims have not been tested in court, so the filing is not a finding of infringement.
Who filed the lawsuit, and where?
The case, Times Publishing Company v. Microsoft Corporation, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York as case number 1:26-cv-08082. The complaint names Microsoft and OpenAI entities as defendants and lists 26 local, regional, and specialty publishers as plaintiffs. Bloomberg Law reported that the publisher groups collectively represent about 160 news publications, including the Tampa Bay Times, the Austin Chronicle, and Florida Trend.
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The 26 plaintiffs and the roughly 160 publications they represent are different counts: neither number establishes how much material was copied or whether any infringement occurred.
What do the publishers allege?
The publishers allege that the defendants crawled their websites, including paywalled material, and copied articles to train ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. They further allege that copyright-management information, such as author credits and copyright notices, was removed, and that the models could reproduce their material. These assertions are allegations in the complaint, not established facts.
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The case tracker characterizes the claims as direct and vicarious copyright infringement and a claim under Section 1202 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), concerning removal of copyright-management information. The complaint summary says Times Publishing Company alone brings the infringement claims involving its registered works; all 26 plaintiffs bring the DMCA claim against the OpenAI defendants.
What are the publishers asking the court to do?
According to the complaint summary, the requested relief includes statutory and compensatory damages, a permanent injunction, and an order requiring the removal of Times Publishing Company’s registered works from GPT and other models and training sets. These are requests by the plaintiffs; the reviewed sources do not report that a court has granted them.
How have Microsoft and OpenAI responded?
New England Public Media (NEPM) quoted an OpenAI spokesperson saying: “Our models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, which helps hundreds of millions of people improve their daily lives and delivers benefits such as empowering human creativity, science, and medical research.” That is OpenAI’s stated position in response to the dispute, not a court ruling on fair use.
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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsNEPM also quoted a Microsoft spokesperson saying the company respects the role news organizations play in public discourse and has partnered with them to safeguard journalism. The spokesperson argued that copyright law does not allow publishers to block transformative technologies that do not replace protected expression, and that rights holders must adapt to technological progress. Those statements express Microsoft’s position; the court has not resolved the legal issues.
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Brian Zayatz, managing editor of The Shoestring, told NEPM that publishers should be compensated and that there was “a pretty well documented case to make that a theft has taken place here.” NEPM reported that The Shoestring dataset he described contained over 68,000 tokens. His characterization and that outlet-specific figure do not establish what happened to every plaintiff’s work or prove infringement.
How does this case relate to other publisher lawsuits?
This Times Publishing complaint is distinct from other actions against AI companies. TechCrunch reported that The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a separate suit on September 5, 2026. The New York Times case is another separate lawsuit. The available reporting does not establish that the September 16 filing amended or extended either of those cases.
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What is the procedural status?
The AI Lawsuit Tracker listed the matter as active and said the plaintiffs sought coordination with the OpenAI copyright multidistrict litigation (MDL). Its review of the court record was last conducted on September 27, 2026. That is a dated snapshot, not confirmation of the docket’s status today; later developments are not established by the sources reviewed here. The complaint’s allegations and requested remedies therefore should not be treated as court findings or orders.
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