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AI copyright news, graded by source

Court rulings, company filings and allegations in the copyright cases against AI companies and pirate libraries, over books, articles, music, images, video and code. Checked for new filings every three hours; items are posted after review, so some appear later. Get these by e-mail · Court filings, free to read

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AllegationOctober 8, 2026USA Today Co., Inc. v. OpenAI Foundation · S.D.N.Y., No. 1:26-cv-08892

USA Today and 13 other Gannett newspaper companies sue OpenAI, alleging its models were trained on hundreds of thousands of their articles and that GPT-5.6 reproduces them

On Oct. 8, 2026, USA Today Co. and 13 affiliated publishers (including the Detroit Free Press, Des Moines Register, Courier-Journal, Arizona Republic and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), represented by Rothwell Figg, filed a 79-page complaint against the OpenAI entities (not Microsoft). They allege copyright infringement, vicarious infringement and DMCA 1202 removal of copyright management information, saying OpenAI's WebText data included 83,266 entries from usatoday.com, that Common Crawl and WebText2 carried their content into GPT-3 and later models, and that OpenAI trained its models to summarize articles in place of linking to them. Exhibit B shows GPT-5.6 responses the plaintiffs say retrieved and reproduced articles from the Indianapolis Star, Detroit Free Press, Tennessean and other titles. The complaint quotes Sam Altman's statement to the House of Lords that training leading models without copyrighted material would be "impossible," and cites a Microsoft executive's internal description of OpenAI's conduct. These are allegations; OpenAI has not responded. The suit was filed in the district that hosts the OpenAI MDL.

Complaint, Dkt. 1 (RECAP) ↗

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What the labels mean

Every item says what kind of source it rests on. A court ruling or order is the court's own statement. A company filing is what a defendant says about itself. A government filing is a statement by a government agency that is not a party to the case, such as a statement of interest; it is the government's position, not a ruling. An allegation is what a complaint or motion claims and has not been decided. Reported means press reporting we have not confirmed from the primary document. Summaries are our own; follow the links for the source.

This page is general information, not legal advice. An allegation is not a finding. Whether any of this matters for a particular work or claim is a question for a lawyer.