Major Canadian news orgs sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

Canada’s largest news media companies have teamed up to file a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) company infringed on their copyright to train the model that powers its massively popular chat bot ChatGPT. 

The plaintiffs include Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC/Radio-Canada. Combined, they own hundreds of local and national news outlets across Canada. 

Claim seeks to address the “inappropriate and illegal use” of Canadian content.

The lawsuit, which was filed in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice on Friday morning, is seeking damages, the profits that OpenAI has made from the alleged infringement, and an injunction to prevent future use of their work by OpenAI. This could potentially include statutory damages of $20,000 per allegedly infringed work, or an amount that the court deems fair. According to the lawsuit, the news companies own and have published a combined 10.65 million works since 2015. 

“Rather than seek to obtain the information legally, OpenAI has elected to brazenly misappropriate the News Media Companies’ valuable intellectual property and convert it for its own uses, including commercial uses, without consent or consideration,” the lawsuit filing reads. 

BetaKit has reached out to OpenAI for comment, but did not hear back by publication time. The allegations have not yet been proven in court. OpenAI has 40 days to file its statement of defence. 

The claim seeks to address the “inappropriate and illegal use” of Canadian content, and enforce Canadian laws, Postmedia said in a statement. 

RELATED: Online legal database CanLII sues Caseway AI for copyright infringement

“OpenAI regularly breaches copyright and online terms of use by scraping large swaths of content from Canadian media to help develop its products, such as ChatGPT,” the statement reads. “OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners.” 

“Journalism is in the public interest,” the statement continues. “OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.” 

AI giants like OpenAI have been dealing with numerous lawsuits relating to data scraping and AI training practices. OpenAI is currently in the midst of a legal battle with The New York Times, which is raising similar issues as the Canadian news publications. Last week, TechCrunch reported that OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in that case while making a configuration change to the dataset under investigation. 

In a similar intellectual-property spat earlier this month, The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) filed a lawsuit against AI startup Caseway, alleging Caseway violated its terms of use and infringed copyright by scraping 3.5 million records from CanLII’s database.

Feature image courtesy OpenAI.