Product2 distinct publishers3 min readPublished
The two papers say their paywalls were bypassed methodically, which puts the terms of access at issue in the US and touches a commitment OpenAI already signed in Europe. Microsoft went after the damages theories the same day.
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Somebody at a regional paper owns the meter configuration, and this week that person acquires a legal audience. The Seattle Times and Newsday complaint argues about how the articles were reached and not only about what the models produced, which is the distinction TNW drew in reading the filing [3][4]. Product decisions sit on that side of the line.
Publishers mostly treat the wall as a revenue instrument: how many free stories a visitor gets before the prompt appears, and which referrers get waved through. The filing treats it as a statement of the terms on which a page may be accessed, and alleges those terms were bypassed methodically [3]. Those are two different objects sharing one settings screen.
Microsoft's response, according to TNW, went at the money rather than the mechanism. On the same day, in the same court, it asked for rejection of the two theories the complaint rests on, lost licensing fees and market dilution [11]. TNW's reading is that the paywall allegation travels furthest of the four in the complaint, because Microsoft's fair use brief argues about books rather than about how pages were reached [12].
In Europe the same conduct is something a company has already promised to avoid. The copyright chapter of the EU's general-purpose AI code commits signatories not to circumvent effective technological measures restricting access, with specific attention to subscription models and paywalls, and it requires crawlers to read and follow robots.txt [13][14]. OpenAI signed it [15]. The code carries two limits worth knowing before anyone builds a strategy on it. It has applied only since August 2025, roughly two years after the New York Times filing that opened this front, so the training runs at the origin of the litigation sit outside its commitments [19]. And whether a paywall counts as a valid reservation of rights is unsettled, because the directive asks for machine-readable means and no court has ruled that a wall qualifies [16]. What is settled is that Europe has no fair use equivalent, and that a German court held in July, in the case brought by GEMA, that works memorised in model parameters infringe at the point of storage [17][18].
The forcing question for a publisher with a meter has two axes. First, whether the archive is worth licensing to a lab, the route AP and Vox Media took [9]. Second, whether you can produce a record of what an unauthenticated request to your article pages actually returned, and when. Licensable with a record, and you negotiate from evidence. Licensable without one, and you are selling reputation. Not licensable but holding a record, and you have the claim that the 400 local newspapers already in this litigation are pressing collectively [8]. Neither, and you are a spectator to someone else's discovery.
The cost on that second axis is real, and it is not a legal cost. Whatever the meter gives away to convert casual readers it also gives away to anything that requests the page the same way, and enforcing the wall server-side removes the sampling that sells subscriptions. That tradeoff used to be settled by conversion numbers alone. It now also decides what a publisher can prove about how its pages were reached.
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
The Seattle Times and Newsday jointly filed a lawsuit on Friday against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of training their AI models using their copyrighted works.
The two news organizations called generative AI "a snake eating its own tail" that would destroy the news organizations and content it trained on.
The lawsuit alleges OpenAI and Microsoft were "methodically scraping" news articles in a way that bypasses paywalls.
TNW characterises the paywall-bypass allegation as a claim about how the material was obtained, not only about what was done with it.
The complaint says the result offers readers an AI-generated alternative to the articles themselves, cutting traffic and digital advertising revenue for the two outlets.
The complaint also alleges the models hallucinate, attributing false information to the two outlets, and that copyright management information was removed from articles.
Distinct publishers with included, body-backed reporting in this cluster.
2 articles · September 5, 2026
1 article · September 5, 2026
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One complaint, one document trail
Every allegation traces to a pleading filed hours before publication, and neither publisher has a word from OpenAI or Microsoft answering it. The European material is a different kind of thing: the code's copyright chapter, the 2001 directive and the German judgment are documents a reader can go and check, and they carry most of the weight in our own framing. One Engadget report, published twice, is doing more corroboration work than it should.
Crowded docket, untested theory
Uptake here means which route parties have picked. The suing side keeps growing — the New York Times since 2023, 400 local papers on The Next Web's count, now two more mastheads — and the paying side has AP and Vox Media. The paywall-access theory itself has been adopted by nobody with authority: no court has held that a subscription wall is a machine-readable reservation of rights, and OpenAI's European promise not to circumvent access measures only started applying in August 2025.
European hook slightly ahead of the law
Our framing leans on a commitment OpenAI signed in Europe, and The Next Web's own reporting supplies the two reasons that hook does not close: the code postdates the conduct alleged, and nobody has decided whether a paywall is the kind of reservation the directive means. Engadget's account stays confined to the pleading itself. The overstatement is small and lives in the transatlantic connection, not in the account of the filing.
Plaintiffs' pleading, publishers' bylines
The factual spine is a document written by parties seeking damages, and its counterweight is a brief written by the party facing them. Both publishers here are advertising-supported, reporting on publishers whose advertising revenue is the alleged injury. The AP and Vox Media deals sit alongside as the price the same material fetches when it is sold rather than claimed.
Consistent but thinly held
The two publishers describe the filing identically, and what only The Next Web carries is anchored in named documents and a named court rather than in unattributed sourcing. Holding the number down: nobody has independently examined the scraping allegation, and one of our two publishers appears twice.