 "Canada's top new outlets sue OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement in training ChatGPT")
A coalition of Canada’s biggest news outlets is suing OpenAI, the makers of the famous Artificial Intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, for illegally using their content. This will be the first case in which a media organization is going against an AI company in Canada. The coalition comprises five major media houses in the country.
The joint lawsuit was filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Friday morning. While this is the first lawsuit against OpenAI in Canada, it is not the first time a news outlet filed a case against the AI chatbot. Last year, The New York Times, filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the United States. At that time, the NYT claimed that OpenAI was involved in copyright infringement of its content. Both entities have denied the suit’s claims.
The Canadian publishing houses involved in the case include the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the CBC — the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The claims sought by the media organizations could add up to billions of dollars in damages. The claimants are asking for 20,000 Canadian dollars, or $14,700, per article they claim was illegally scraped and used to train ChatGPT.
OpenAI responds
In response to the lawsuit, a spokesperson from OpenAI said that they are yet to review the lawsuit. “We have not yet had the opportunity to review the allegations,” but added that “our models are trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation,” the spokesperson averred.
In the lawsuit, the Canadian news organizations are also seeking a share of the profits made by what they claim is OpenAI’s misuse of their content. The outlets also asked the company to stop the practice in the future.
“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 news organizations said in a joint statement.
“OpenAI’s public statements that it is somehow fair or in the public interest for them to use other companies’ intellectual property for their own commercial gain is wrong. Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal,” they added.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsIn the 84-page lawsuit, the media houses called out the “unlawful use of journalism produced by them to train ChatGPT.” It went on to accuse OpenAI of ignoring the Canadian news outlets’ use of specific technological and legal tools — such as the Robot Exclusion Protocol, copyright disclaimers, and paywalls.
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