NEW YORK CITY — After two years of intense copyright litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft, Loevy + Loevy clients The Intercept and The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), which produces Mother Jones and Reveal, filed their opening brief in the Southern District of New York today. CIR and The Intercept, along with other news organizations whose cases were consolidated as part of a multi-district litigation, argue that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped millions of news articles from the internet without permission or compensation, stripped them of their copyright attribution, and used them to create ChatGPT and Copilot.
According to the news organzations’ filing, relying on evidence that remains under seal at OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s insistence:
- Defendants repeatedly copied Plaintiffs’ copyrighted articles in their entirety without permission to produce substitutive commercial AI products.
- Since the Copyright Act of 1976 codified fair use as a narrow limitation on these rights, the Supreme Court has found commercial copying fair only once: for copying code to implement functional compatibility with software interfaces. The Second Circuit has absolved widespread copying of expressive works only to the extent necessary to allow people to find those works themselves. Defendants’ competitive exploitation of Plaintiffs’ expressive works cannot be excused under these precedents.
- The future—not just of journalism, but also of responsible AI—depends on preserving incentives for humans to produce the creative works on which a healthy society depends.
“OpenAI and Microsoft, backed by the zealously pro-AI Trump administration, billions of dollars in capital, and an army of lawyers from six major law firms, are fighting to defend a massive theft of human labor and creativity,” said Loevy + Loevy partner Matt Topic, who is leading the litigation on behalf of the non-profit publishers. “They claim they are protected by ‘fair use,’ but there is nothing remotely fair about allowing billionaire technology companies and their Silicon Valley investors to steal the work of non-profit newsrooms to create commercial products that are increasingly starving publishers of their audiences.”
The litigation was filed in 2024. Previously, it had been nearly impossible for digital publishers—especially non-profit ones—to bring traditional copyright infringement claims at this massive scale, due to Copyright Office registration rules from the pre-internet era and outdated provisions of the Copyright Act that require creators to pay a per-work tax to the Library of Congress as a condition to enforcing their rights in court. This made infringement claims economically prohibitive for exclusively digital publishers like The Intercept and even publishers like CIR, who register some of their works with the Copyright Office. Copyright litigation is often grueling given the associated costs and labor.
To ensure that copyright protection from AI encroachment would not be limited to legacy newspapers, Loevy + Loevy and its clients pioneered the approach of challenging the removal of “copyright management information” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—a law intended to protect against widespread facilitation of infringement on the internet, which has particular and important relevance to AI. Topic was named to Time’s 2024 list of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in connection with this strategy.
The Intercept and CIR have pursued this litigation to ensure that non-profit voices are represented before the courts.
CIR is the oldest nonprofit investigative newsroom in the country. Its mission is independent, investigative reporting that exposes untold stories and sparks action, on issues such as the crisis of democracy, political and corporate abuses of power, and movements and individuals working for change. It reaches an audience of more than 10 million each month via Mother Jones’ print, digital, and video channels, and the investigative radio show and podcast Reveal..
The Intercept is a non-profit news organization dedicated to holding the powerful accountable through fearless, adversarial journalism. Its investigations focus on politics, war, surveillance, corruption, the environment, technology, criminal justice, the media, and other issues.
Under the briefing schedule, additional briefs will be filed on October 9 and November 6, 2026.
CIR is also represented by Jon Loevy, Mike Kanovitz, Stephen Stich Match, Kyle Wallenberg, Shelley Geiszler, and Lauren Sonnenberg of Loevy + Loevy.