NYT, Authors Guild, OpenAI and Microsoft all move for summary judgment in consolidated copyright case
Cross-motions filed September 4-5 ask Judge Sidney Stein to decide the core fair-use question in the New York-based multidistrict litigation without a trial; opposition briefs are due in October.
All parties in In Re: OpenAI Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation (1:25-md-03143, S.D.N.Y.) filed cross-motions for summary judgment on September 4 and 5, 2026, asking Judge Sidney Stein to resolve the case's central fair-use dispute without a trial, Publishers Weekly reported September 9. The Authors Guild and 13 co-plaintiff authors, including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and Jonathan Franzen, argued in their filing that "OpenAI built the foundations of its business on mass piracy," pointing to the company's use of Library Genesis to source training text. Opposition briefs are due in early October and replies in early November, putting a ruling months away at the earliest.
The fair-use fight comes down to a number
OpenAI and Microsoft's cross-motion leans on a technical metric: an alleged regurgitation rate of roughly 0.00007%, offered as evidence that ChatGPT essentially never reproduces protected text verbatim and that its training use is transformative rather than substitutive. That framing puts a specific, contestable figure at the center of the fair-use analysis -- whether training-time copying is legally distinct from output-time reproduction -- rather than leaving it as an abstract doctrinal argument, and it's the number the plaintiffs' opposition will have to directly engage with in October.
Why a summary-judgment ruling here matters beyond this case
This is the consolidated multidistrict case bundling the New York Times, Daily News, Authors Guild, and other publisher and author claims against OpenAI and Microsoft, making it the most consequential pending test of whether training large language models on copyrighted text is fair use as a matter of law. A summary-judgment ruling from Judge Stein -- rather than a jury verdict after trial -- would set precedent industry-wide well before any damages phase, which is why both sides moved to put the question to the judge now instead of waiting.