Canada: A coalition of Canada’s major news organisations, including the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC, has launched a lawsuit against OpenAI, charging the company of unlawfully using their news articles to train its artificial intelligence model, ChatGPT.
The lawsuit, depicted as the first of its kind in Canada, claims that OpenAI is illegally scraping content from Canadian media without authorisation, bypassing paywalls and copyright protections. The publishers claim that OpenAI’s use of their journalism for commercial gain is a violation of copyright law.
The coalition said in a joint statement, stating that, “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.” OpenAI, in response, remarked that its models are trained on publicly available data, affirming that the practice is aligned with fair use and international copyright principles. The company also highlighted its efforts to collaborate with news publishers by delivering attribution and links to their content in ChatGPT searches and providing an option for publishers to opt-out.
Despite these statements, the media group is desiring significant compensation. They are demanding $14,300 (C$20,000; £11,000) per article they claim was used to train the AI, potentially amounting to billions of dollars. Additionally, they are bidding that OpenAI share any profits generated from the use of their content and seek an injunction to prevent future unauthorised use.
This lawsuit reflects similar legal actions taken in the United States, where major publishers have accused OpenAI of copyright infringement. Recently, the company faced charges of attempting to erase evidence related to the case. OpenAI’s latest fundraising has reportedly raised its valuation to $156.2 billion (C$219 billion).
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