Five prominent Canadian news organizations filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday, accusing the AI company of violating copyright laws and terms of service. The lawsuit, brought forth by Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC/Radio-Canada, alleges that OpenAI has been scraping large amounts of content from these outlets without permission or compensation in order to develop and improve its AI products, including the widely used language model, ChatGPT.
This legal action is part of a growing trend of lawsuits filed by various copyright holders, including authors, visual artists, and music publishers, against OpenAI and other tech giants. These lawsuits are focused on the data used to train generative AI systems. OpenAI, which is heavily backed by Microsoft, has faced increasing scrutiny over its use of copyrighted materials in the training process, sparking debates around intellectual property and the commercial use of content created by others.
In a joint statement, the Canadian news companies emphasized the importance of journalism for the public good, arguing that OpenAI’s use of their content for commercial purposes without consent is both unethical and illegal. “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not,” they stated. The companies are seeking compensation and are demanding that OpenAI stop using their materials without authorization.
This lawsuit follows a similar case in the United States, where a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit on November 7 against OpenAI that accused the company of misusing content from news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet. The five Canadian news organizations have filed an 84-page statement of claim in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, demanding financial damages and a permanent injunction to prevent OpenAI from using their content without permission in the future.