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OpenAI secured a significant procedural victory when a federal judge dismissed Raw Story Media and AlterNet Media’s copyright lawsuit. But the November 2024 ruling did not decide that scraping copyrighted news, copying works into AI-training datasets, or training models on those works is categorically lawful. The case turned on whether the publishers had shown a concrete injury under the legal theory they pleaded.
The case in brief
On November 7, 2024, Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted OpenAI’s motion to dismiss Raw Story Media, Inc. v. OpenAI Inc., case 24 Civ. 01514. Raw Story Media and AlterNet Media alleged that OpenAI and related entities copied their journalism, removed or failed to preserve copyright-management information, and used the altered copies to train ChatGPT. Their principal claim invoked Section 1202(b) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The court dismissed the complaint for lack of Article III standing. The original order also denied leave to amend. The decision is available at the court decision mirror.
In June 2025, Judge Sidney H. Stein denied the publishers’ motion for reconsideration. That order acknowledged tension between the standing analysis in this case and a later decision in The New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp., but held that the inconsistency did not justify reopening the judgment because the plaintiffs could pursue an appeal. Read the June 18, 2025 reconsideration order.
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The Bottom Line
OpenAI won this lawsuit at the pleading stage, not a blanket judicial declaration that scraping copyrighted news for AI training is legal. The dismissal focused on standing and left fair use, dataset copying, output reproduction, and market harm for other cases and better-developed records.
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