Alden Global Capital, the owner of eight major newspapers in cities across the U.S. has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.

They are claiming that generative artificial intelligence models are being fed human-created reporting ... and then essentially ripping it off.

This comes after the New York Times filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, earlier this year.

Richard Tofel is a consultant who formerly served as president of the independent news reporting outlet Pro-Publica; he writes a substack called Second Rough Draft.

He explained to us the copyright principles at stake; Tofel says newspapers are arguing that human created articles and reporting are just being re-purposed by AI:

Several other news outlets ... including the Financial Times and Associated Press ... have made similar claims about A-I models stealing from their reporting.  

But instead of a lawsuit, the outlets have worked out compensation deals to be paid by OpenAI and Microsoft.