The harm they describe: the visit that stops happening
The complaint the Seattle Times and Newsday filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York says their sites, including content behind paywalls, were scraped into training datasets that feed ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features. That is where the ownership argument starts: the labor that produced the reporting sits in one place and control of the product derived from it sits in another.[1]
The way the complaint frames the harm supports that reading. The papers are not only unhappy about reproduced passages and close paraphrase; the weight falls on answers that reduce the need to visit the sites or buy a subscription. What gets copied is text, and what gets displaced is the transaction that pays for the reporting.[1]
What the destruction demand is for
The papers ask the court to order the destruction of copies of their works, of the training datasets and of the models built on them. That request reads less like an ornament beside the damages claim and more like the centre of gravity in the bargaining.[1]
The mechanism is plain: a per-article licence fee does not restore the visit the complaint describes, because once the visit is diverted the subscription relationship is not rebuilt either. A remedy that reaches the model changes the other side's cost, and that is what puts real weight on the table. There is a more ordinary explanation for the same demand: an opening position pitched high in proportion to the alleged harm, meant to be traded away later. Both readings fit the text of the complaint.[1]
The companies answer without touching ownership
An OpenAI spokesperson said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use. A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was surprised by the suit but appreciates the importance of local journalism. Both sentences speak about where the input came from or how the suit feels; neither says whose account the value created from that input is credited to.[1]
The New York Times case filed against the same two companies in 2023 is still open, which shows how slowly this question moves on a court calendar. For the side waiting to be paid for journalistic labor there is one measurable question: when the destruction demand survives to the merits, does the other side's willingness to pay move, or does the demand stay a sentence in a filing?[1]