Lawyers for the New York Daily News, The New York Times, and other newspapers Wednesday asked a Manhattan judge to reject an effort by OpenAI and Microsoft to dismiss parts of their lawsuits accusing the tech giants of stealing reporters’ stories to train their AI products. The News, its affiliated newspapers in Media News Group and Tribune Publishing, The Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting have accused OpenAI and Microsoft of pilfering millions of their copyrighted news stories — without consent, credit, or compensation — to fuel lucrative AI products exploding in popularity like ChatGPT and Copilot. Microsoft and OpenAI don’t deny they depend on copyrighted material but say it’s their right under the fair use doctrine and that their products are “a powerful tool for human flourishing.” The doctrine permits the use of copyrighted materials without permission under certain conditions, including transforming the work for educational purposes provided it does not hurt the current or future market for the materials. Within their motions to dismiss portions of the case — the topic of Wednesday’s hearing before Manhattan federal court Judge Sidney Stein — Microsoft and OpenAI did not challenge core portions of the case, ensuring the copyright infringement claims at the heart of the case can go forward. The motions respectively argue the newspapers failed to cite examples of infringement, provide evidence that the tech companies knowingly contributed to it, and didn’t file suit within the statute of limitations, among other arguments.