Eight Alden Newspapers Sue OpenAI: Claims and 2025 Ruling

Eight papers, one hedge fund owner

Eight newspaper publishers filed suit against Microsoft and OpenAI on April 30, 2024, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, docketed as case 1:24-cv-03285. The plaintiffs operate the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post, the Orange County Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, all owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. [3]

The complaint says ChatGPT and Copilot have been "purloining millions of the publishers' copyrighted articles without permission and without payment," and that GPT-4 "will output near-verbatim copies of significant portions of the publishers' works when prompted to do so." It brings claims for direct and contributory copyright infringement, trademark infringement, common law misappropriation, and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's copyright management information provision, and asks for damages, an injunction and destruction of any model built on the plaintiffs' work. [3][4]

OpenAI's own motion papers call this a "copycat lawsuit, modeled after the one the New York Times filed against OpenAI in December 2023," and the description fits the facts, not just OpenAI's framing of them. Both suits ended up in front of the same judge, Sidney Stein, making the two cases companions from the start rather than independent tests of the same legal theory. [4]

What the defendants said

An OpenAI spokesperson said the company was "not previously aware of Alden Global Capital's concerns" and was "actively engaged in constructive partnerships and conversations with many news organizations around the world to explore opportunities, discuss any concerns, and provide solutions." Microsoft declined to comment at the time of filing. [3]

OpenAI's June 2024 motion to dismiss the ancillary claims argued the contributory infringement claim relied on generalized knowledge of third party infringement rather than knowledge of specific instances, that the copyright management information claim failed because the statute does not reach how a model is trained or what it outputs, and that the common law misappropriation claim was preempted by the Copyright Act. It did not move to dismiss the core direct infringement claim. [4]

Most of the case survives

Judge Stein ruled on the motions on March 26, 2025, in a decision covering this case together with the Times' suit and one brought by the Center for Investigative Reporting. He rejected the statute of limitations and trademark dilution challenges and let the copyright management information claim against OpenAI stand, while dismissing that claim against Microsoft, a secondary copyright management information theory against OpenAI, and one unfair competition claim against both defendants. He also dismissed some claims specific to the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Times. [5]

Steven Lieberman, a lawyer for the publishers, said "we get to go forward with virtually all of our claims intact, including all of the copyright filings." Frank Pine, executive editor at MediaNews Group, called the ruling "a significant victory for us" and said the dismissed claims "do not undermine the main thrust of our case." OpenAI said it "welcomed the court's dismissal of many of these claims" and would keep arguing that its training practices are fair use; Microsoft declined to comment again. [5]

Both sides can honestly call the ruling a win because it decided a motion to dismiss, not the merits: surviving means the newspapers' core allegations were pleaded well enough to proceed to discovery and trial, not that a court found the copying happened or that fair use fails. The case remained active as of this check, coordinated with the Times' suit and other publisher cases before the same judge. [5]