A Reddit user recently boasted they had built an AI tool to scrape local news and “generate full-length podcast audio.” Several commenters celebrated his work, suggesting they were building something similar.
Conspicuously absent from the thread were any concerns about what these tools could mean for the future of journalism and its business models. No one acknowledged that local news takes labor and resources to report, and that scraping tools used to generate information fueled by AI ”slop” fundamentally benefit from other people’s work.
How can news organizations protect the fruits of their investments in journalism from being used to create immediately competing AI products? A century-old Supreme Court tool — the “hot news” doctrine — could provide a legal mechanism for doing so.
Individuals and corporations looking to turn a quick profit using AI slop — low-quality, digitally created content — are increasingly scraping news websites, using hard-won journalism without paying for it.
A report earlier this year noted that minutes after the student-run Duke Chronicle published an article about a Duke pole vaulter’s victory in a recent competition, Durham News Today, part of a nationwide AI podcast network, posted a short audio report about the student’s success. A comparison showed that the podcast appeared to be substantially drawn from the newspaper story. Its publisher — who did not respond to an email seeking comment — has no affiliation or content-sharing agreement with the Chronicle.
While it’s easy to lump these scraping concerns into the growing list of threats that AI tools pose for the future of journalism, the often-forgotten hot news doctrine, which was created to protect the cost and labor of news-producers’ work for short periods of time, provides the framework for a potential legal solution, despite the fact it has met defeat when cited by plaintiffs in a handful of court cases, most notably involving The New York Times, OpenAI, and Microsoft last year.
The Supreme Court created the hot news doctrine in 1918 when it decided a case between competing wire services: the Associated Press and the International News Service. The AP accused the INS of stealing and redistributing its content, particularly news from World War I that the service’s reporters provided to subscribing newspapers. The AP argued that the INS was essentially taking the expensive and labor-intensive reporting work the AP invested in for its subscribers and making it available to their competitors.
In its decision, the Supreme Court explicitly declined to give journalists a copyright-related property over news in the case, but still sided with the AP. Justices contended that the INS’ practice of taking AP reporting and distributing it to subscribers amounted to unfair business competition.
The court reasoned, “The defendant, by its very act, admits that it is taking material that has been acquired by complainant as the result of organization and the expenditure of labor, skill, and money.”
The court continued that the INS was “endeavoring to reap where it has not sown.”
The reaping, justices emphasized, was not about copyrighting the facts in news reports. It was about protecting aspects of news production.
Justices created the hot news doctrine to provide news organizations a temporary period of ownership over their reporting.
“To me, the hot news doctrine was always about protecting labor,” said Tori Ekstrand, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has studied the doctrine extensively. “It’s about the sweat-of-the-brow factor. What’s the incentive for news producers to do this work?”
While the doctrine provides crucial elements for a legal solution to AI scraping concerns, it has struggled as a legal tool, particularly in the internet era. In a 1997 case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit agreed that the hot news doctrine was applicable but still rejected the NBA’s claim that Motorola created unfair competition with its SportsTrax device, which conveyed real-time game results and statistics.
In 2011, the same 2nd Circuit rejected a group of financial firms’ claims that a financial news aggregator was taking their time-sensitive reports and distributing them, for a fee, to audiences without their permission. The court reasoned the hot news doctrine conflicted with federal copyright law, which does not allow anyone to own factual information. The ruling overturned a lower court’s holding that TheFlyOnTheWall.com had misappropriated the information; that court prohibited the aggregator from distributing the information for a period of between 30 minutes and several hours.
Citing those cases, a federal district court followed the same reasoning in April 2025 when it rejected The New York Times’ hot news doctrine claim in its ongoing case against OpenAI and Microsoft. The court again reasoned that copyright concerns preempted arguments surrounding the hot news doctrine.
These points don’t mean news organizations should be left to do the legwork for AI slop competitors, however, or that the doctrine can’t be adapted to fit the current media landscape.
These decisions do not foreclose on the value the doctrine can have for a news industry facing unfair competition from AI-slop producers. Even the 2025 district court ruling explicitly noted that hot news claims can still succeed, outlining a claim based on a distributor “free-riding” on a news organization’s content. The court reasoned the use of The New York Times’ stories to train AI tools was not free-riding, but that AI-scraping that turns news reporting into competing AI slop could be.
Crucially, the Supreme Court has never overturned the doctrine, and while adverse rulings have raised important questions, they haven’t undermined its foundations.
These decisions do indicate that, to be successful, the doctrine needs to be considered in the context of labor and resources, not copyright. That would track closely with the Supreme Court’s 1918 decision, which emphasized the doctrine was based on unfair competition legal grounds, not copyright.
The Supreme Court created the doctrine to postpone “participation by complainant’s competitor in the process of distribution and reproduction of news” that was “only to the extent necessary to prevent the competitor from reaping the fruits of the complainant’s efforts.”
In addition, modern jurists should consider the alternative: Absent protection from AI scrapers using news content to create AI slop, the economic calculus for news organizations will become increasingly grim. Economic concern was also present in the 1918 Supreme Court decision, when justices emphasized the harm the INS’ unfair competition was causing.
“We have seen this movie before, and it’s extremely frustrating for news providers not to have protection simply because what we do is based on fact,” Ekstrand said.
A carefully crafted lawsuit by a news organization that is based on the hot news doctrine’s unfair competition reasoning, and not copyright claims, could help ward off AI scrapers seeking to profit from the organization’s resource-intensive reporting.
“While it has been significantly curbed,” Ekstrand said, “courts that look carefully will take some time to realize there is something clear to protect here.”
Certainly, the doctrine has always been opaque. The justices, for example, never provided a set time period of protection for news reports. And technology hasn’t helped, speeding up the information-sharing process. These points don’t mean news organizations should be left to do the legwork for AI slop competitors, however, or that the doctrine can’t be adapted to fit the current media landscape.
The hot news doctrine provides a Supreme Court-approved solution that should be revitalized and understood as providing the basis for a 21st century protection against unfair competition. Without it, news organizations will increasingly inadvertently fund AI slop that competes with their hard-won reporting.