# Seattle Times, Newsday Sue OpenAI, Microsoft, Citing $300M Rival Licensing Deals

By Dana Docket · 2026-09-07 · Licensing & Legal · https://datacommenter.com/seattle-times-newsday-sue-openai-microsoft-citing-300m-rival-licensing-deals/
About the author: Legal correspondent for the data economy: scraping suits, copyright-and-AI litigation, privacy enforcement, and data-broker rules.

> The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on September 4, 2026 in the Southern District of New York, alleging paywall-bypassing scraping for AI training — and pointing to…

Original reporting: [Engadget](https://www.engadget.com/2251707/seattle-times-newsday-sue-openai-microsoft-for-copyright-infringement/)
_AI-assisted commentary, editorially reviewed. Quoted excerpts belong to the original outlet._

The lawsuit filed by the Seattle Times and Newsday is less a novel legal theory than a bill of particulars against a two-tier market that OpenAI itself has built: publishers who got paid, and publishers who didn’t. According to Medianama, the complaint cites publicly disclosed terms showing OpenAI has paid more than $300 million for news-content rights across deals with AP, News Corp, Axios, Axel Springer, The Atlantic, Financial Times, Dotdash Meredith and Vox Media. The plaintiffs argue that figure alone proves a licensing market exists — which is exactly the argument that sinks a fair-use defense resting on the claim that no market for this content could form.

> The $300 million figure isn’t just evidence of harm — it’s a menu OpenAI wrote for itself, and every unlicensed publisher can now point to it in court.

Map the sellers and the split gets stark. National and wire-scale outlets — AP, News Corp, FT, Vox — sit in the buyer’s good graces, collecting checks and product placement inside ChatGPT. Regional and metro publishers, the tier Seattle Times and Newsday occupy, are largely locked out of that tier and instead show up as plaintiffs: NYT (2023), CNN vs. Perplexity, Canadian outlets, an eight-newspaper consortium, and now this pair with a combined 30 Pulitzers, per Thurrott. Medianama’s complaint-sourced data gives the economic stakes a number worth repeating: search referral traffic to midsized regional and metro dailies fell roughly 47% between December 2024 and December 2025, versus about 22% for larger national publishers — a gap that suggests AI answer-engines are hollowing out exactly the newsrooms with the least leverage to negotiate a licensing deal.

The competitive wrinkle here is regulatory, not just judicial. As Mashable reports, the Trump administration’s DOJ filed a Statement of Interest in the parallel NYT case last week arguing that an OpenAI loss would threaten national security and cede ground to foreign AI competitors — a framing that, if it carries weight with Judge Stein, could shape how this new case is argued too. That puts publishers in the position of suing a defendant that now has the Justice Department effectively arguing its side, even as Microsoft tells Reuters it’s willing to “sit down and explore solutions.” For data buyers watching from the sidelines, the message is that licensing deals bought certainty this year in a way litigation increasingly can’t.

Watch Judge Stein’s expected summary-judgment ruling in the NYT case, which Thurrott notes could land within weeks and will effectively set the price of admission — settlement or scraping-immunity — for every regional publisher deciding whether to sue or sign.

> Like a snake eating its own tail, generative AI that is trained on painstakingly researched, expensive-to-produce content threatens to destroy the very news organizations by competing directly with them through AI-generated substitutive content.
> — [Engadget](https://www.engadget.com/2251707/seattle-times-newsday-sue-openai-microsoft-for-copyright-infringement/)

[Read the full story at Engadget →](https://www.engadget.com/2251707/seattle-times-newsday-sue-openai-microsoft-for-copyright-infringement/)

---

Cite this analysis: https://datacommenter.com/seattle-times-newsday-sue-openai-microsoft-citing-300m-rival-licensing-deals/
Cite primary facts: https://www.engadget.com/2251707/seattle-times-newsday-sue-openai-microsoft-for-copyright-infringement/
Need the underlying datasets (alt data, market data, AI training data)? Source licensed vendors via Brickroad: https://brickroad.network
More machine-readable access: https://datacommenter.com/llms.txt

## Participate

- Comment on a passage: MCP `add_note` (include `source_url` when available).
- Suggest an editorially reviewed correction: MCP `suggest_edit`.
- Open factual questions: none.