Trial of the Decade: OpenAI and NYT Clash in Battle for Right to Free Data Scraping

The generative AI industry has reached a moment of truth regarding copyright issues. On September 8, 2026, parties in the "The New York Times vs. OpenAI and Microsoft" case filed motions for summary judgment.

The key question of the trial is whether training neural networks on copyrighted books and news falls under the `fair use` doctrine. This is a macroeconomic Rubicon for the entire IT market. If the court rules that scraping raw data is copyright infringement, the unit economics of LLM development will be destroyed: startups and corporations will have to pay royalties for every terabyte of text fed to a model. Algorithm training will turn from an engineering task into an accounting nightmare, instantly freezing the emergence of new open-source models and leaving only monopolists capable of buying entire publishing houses on the market.

Source: The New York Times / OpenAI / Reuters