Thunder Bay, ON – In a groundbreaking legal battle, a coalition of Canada’s largest news organizations has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the creators of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, alleging the unauthorized use of their news articles to train the software. This marks the first lawsuit of its kind in Canada.
The media coalition, which includes prominent names like the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC, accuses OpenAI of “regularly breaching copyright and online terms of use” by scraping their content to develop its products.
“Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal,” the coalition declared in a joint statement.
The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI bypassed safeguards such as paywalls and copyright disclaimers to access and utilize copyrighted material without permission. The media giants are seeking significant compensation, demanding C$20,000 per article allegedly used illegally, a figure that could potentially amount to billions of dollars. They are also pursuing an order for OpenAI to share profits generated from the use of their articles and an injunction to prevent any future use.
OpenAI, recently valued at a staggering C$219 billion, maintains that its models are trained on publicly available data and operate within the bounds of fair use and international copyright principles. The company claims to collaborate with news publishers and provides options for them to opt out of having their content used.
This Canadian lawsuit follows similar legal challenges against OpenAI in the United States, including a case filed by the New York Times and another by the Authors Guild representing prominent writers like John Grisham. These cases highlight the growing tension between AI developers and content creators over copyright and fair use in the age of artificial intelligence.
