The Docket: June 23rd 2026
Memoirs, models, and media giants in the crosshairs: Court's in session. Each week we bring you The Docket: Lawsuits of the week."
Former Facebook executive takes Meta to court over book promotion ban
Sarah Wynn-Williams, who once worked in policy at Facebook, has filed suit against Meta over its use of arbitration proceedings to stop her from publicizing her tell-all book, "Careless People," for over a year. The memoir reportedly details misconduct among Facebook's leadership. Wynn-Williams wants a judge to cancel the arbitration restriction, throw out the non-disparagement terms in the severance deal she signed in 2017, and compensate her for income she lost from book sales and speaking engagements.
YouTube reaches settlement; trial looms for other platforms
YouTube has resolved a lawsuit brought by a teenager from Florida who claimed the platform was intentionally engineered to hook young users. The same plaintiff still has active claims against Meta, TikTok, and Snap, with those cases headed to a Los Angeles courtroom starting July 27.
Hundreds of local papers band together against OpenAI and Microsoft
A coalition representing close to 400 community and regional newspapers has filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using newspaper content without consent or compensation to train ChatGPT and Copilot. According to the law firm representing the publishers, this marks the biggest joint legal action by local news outlets to date. The complaint goes further than copyright infringement, also accusing OpenAI of stripping out attribution data—like author credits and copyright notices—from the source material, which the suit says breaches the DMCA.
NYT seeks to strengthen its case against OpenAI and Microsoft
In a related development, The New York Times has petitioned to revise its existing copyright lawsuit, now arguing that Microsoft pushed OpenAI toward infringement by building specialized computing infrastructure that gave extra weight to Times content during training—allegedly to help its models produce journalism-quality output. Microsoft has called this a desperate maneuver to dodge unfavorable legal precedent. This filing follows a recent Supreme Court decision favoring Cox Communications in a piracy case brought by Sony, which raised the bar for proving secondary liability—plaintiffs must now show deliberate intent to encourage infringement, which explains why the Times is emphasizing the supercomputer angle. OpenAI continues to maintain that using publicly accessible data for training qualifies as fair use, an issue still unresolved in the courts.
CNN joins the wave of suits against Perplexity
CNN has filed its own copyright lawsuit against Perplexity in a New York federal court, claiming the AI search company lifted thousands of articles, videos, and photos to build products that produce near-identical competing content. CNN is asking for both monetary damages and a court order to stop the practice. This adds CNN to a growing list of plaintiffs—including The New York Times, Reddit, and Dow Jones—pursuing similar claims against Perplexity.
