The Journalists’ Revolt Against AI Scraping | Countercurrents

Major Latin American publisher Editorial Perfil has filed a significant copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that these AI giants illegally scrape journalistic content to train their models. This legal action highlights a critical tension in the development of artificial intelligence, where proprietary news data is harvested without compensation, challenging the prevailing narrative of AI’s benevolent impact on society. The article argues that AI technologies exacerbate the existing crisis in journalism by bypassing traffic sources and paywalls, effectively undermining the economic viability of news outlets. By creating closed ecosystems that replace direct web visits, these companies reduce revenue streams for publishers, threatening the sustainability of independent journalism and the quality of information available to the public. This case is highly relevant to the open data movement because it questions the ethics and legality of using publicly accessible web content for commercial model training without explicit consent. It underscores the urgent need for transparent data sourcing practices and fair licensing frameworks, ensuring that the open nature of the web does not equate to a free-for-all exploitation of creative works by powerful technology monopolies.

Source: countercurrents.org
Published on 2026-10-10

The Journalists’ Revolt Against AI Scraping | Countercurrents

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