Newsday, Condé Nast, Los Angeles Times and other publishers sue AI company Cohere alleging copyright infringement

A nationwide group of news and magazine publishers, including Newsday, has sued AI company Cohere for copyright infringement, alleging it used publishers' content without permission to train its systems and to create content for users.

Condé Nast, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy Media Company and Politico, as well as Newsday and other members of the Arlington, Virginia-based News/Media Alliance, filed the lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, citing more than 4,000 articles used by Cohere.

In addition to copying publisher content, the alliance alleges Cohere created fake content and attributed it to publishers, damaging the companies' brands. 

Publishers are seeking a permanent injunction that prevents Cohere from engaging in copyright infringement, as well as statutory and actual damages, said Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance. The organization also is seeking clarity from the courts on AI companies' use of copyrighted content. 

"It's a critical moment for our industry," Coffey said. "We find ourselves with AI companies that vacuum up our content and repurpose it and use it in ways that don't seek our permission. That's because of uncertainty around whether it's lawful to use our content in the ways that they do."

The publishers allege Cohere copied content behind paywalls even in cases where news websites made explicit attempts to block companies from scraping content.

"While innovations in AI are embraced by Newsday, we will also make every attempt to protect our intellectual property, and being a part of this action with other publishers and the NMA is an important part of that effort," Newsday Publisher Debby Krenek said in an email to staff on Thursday.

In an emailed statement, Cohere spokesperson Josh Gartner called the lawsuit "misguided and frivolous" and said the company would have welcomed a conversation over the publishers' concerns before it learned of them in the lawsuit. 

"Cohere strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI," Gartner said. "We have long prioritized controls that mitigate the risk of IP infringement and respect the rights of holders."

The lawsuit follows others filed by publishers against AI companies over the unauthorized use of content. In December 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement involving the unauthorized use of its work. In October, News Corp.-owned publishers Dow Jones and the New York Post sued AI search engine Perplexity, alleging the company used its copyrighted content to respond to users’ queries.

U.S. copyright law doesn't protect ideas or facts, but does protect how those facts are expressed, including original analysis of a situation, Irina Manta, founding director of the Center for Intellectual Property Law at Hofstra University, said in an email. 

Earlier this week, a federal judge in Delaware ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters, finding a competitor's use of content from its Westlaw product to build an AI-powered legal search engine did not qualify as fair use, which allows certain replication of copyrighted material. 

Other plaintiffs in the case against Cohere include Advance Local Media, The Atlantic, Forbes Media, The Guardian, Business Insider, Plain Dealer Publishing Company, the Springfield, Massachusetts-based Republican Company, Toronto Star Newspapers and Vox Media.

By Jonathan LaMantia

jonathan.lamantia@newsday.com@jonlamantia

Jonathan LaMantia covers residential real estate and other business news on Long Island. He previously covered the business of health care for Crain's New York Business.