News organization lawsuits don’t ordinarily get the tabloid cover treatment. But the top of today’s New York Daily News heralds “STUNNING ADMISSIONS IN AI COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT CASE.”

The case is New York Times v. Microsoft and OpenAI, and it’s getting outsized attention because the stakes are so high for the news business.

The Daily News and several other publishers are also plaintiffs in the case, which seeks to prove that tech companies violated copyright law en masse while training AI models. A victory would mean a very, very big check to compensate the news outlets that were ripped off.

The case is at a crucial stage right now: summary judgment, when a judge rules for one side or another before a full trial. “Documents related to the case are slowly being unsealed” as the judge weighs the arguments, the NYT’s Karen Weise and Mike Isaac explained here.

And yesterday’s document release was a doozy. Lawyers for the publishers revealed the existence of an internal Microsoft document from 2023 that said “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”

The document was authored by Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science, who also wrote that it was perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history.”

“For the Times and its fellow plaintiffs, Microsoft’s admission amounts to a smoking gun — evidence that Microsoft and OpenAI knew that they were stealing journalism without permission or payment,” WaPo’s Scott Nover and Gerrit De Vynck wrote.

Steven Lieberman, a lawyer who represents some of the publishers, said “the world can see what OpenAI and Microsoft thought all along about the fairness of their own behavior.”

Hecht’s quotes certainly seem to be a problem for the defense, though Microsoft framed Hecht (who’s also a Northwestern professor) “as someone on the payroll to play a contrarian,” Molly Crane-Newman of the Daily News wrote.

Microsoft said in a statement, “These comments reflect one employee’s individual perspective, are not a legal analysis, and do not represent the company’s views. Microsoft’s position is set out in its court filings, which explain why these transformative uses are consistent with copyright law and why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism.”

For the counterargument, here’s the PDF of the publishers’ full motion to the judge.

Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger alluded to his battle against Microsoft and OpenAI in a column marking today’s 175th anniversary of the news organization. His piece is in print with the headline “15 Million First Drafts of History.”

While the Times is in a stronger position today than at any point in its history, Sulzberger recognizes many other outlets are struggling.

“The future of America’s free press is uncertain,” he wrote. “As the advertising-based business model that long supported original reporting has collapsed, the country has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers and a vast majority of local journalism jobs in just two decades.”

“This erosion appears poised to continue as the journalism produced at great cost by news organizations is stolen and repurposed at unprecedented scale by the tech giants behind artificial intelligence,” he continued. “And in this financially weakened state, the press is simultaneously confronting, and sometimes buckling in the face of, the most direct political attacks on its rights and legitimacy in more than a century.”

Sulzberger made similar comments at an A-list party in Tribeca last night. I posted the full text of his remarks on X here.