In the long history of human knowledge being borrowed, repurposed, and contested, a federal courtroom in New York has become the stage for one of the defining disputes of the digital age: whether the vast corpus of journalism that trained artificial intelligence systems was taken, or merely used. The New York Times, joined by a growing coalition of publishers, alleges that Microsoft and OpenAI extracted millions of articles without permission or payment to build ChatGPT — a claim made more striking by an internal Microsoft document describing the practice as perhaps the largest theft of labor