Several prominent Canadian news organizations, including CBC News, The Globe and Mail, and Canadian Press, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of using their journalistic content without permission. The coalition of media outlets, which also includes The Toronto Star, Metroland Media Group, and Postmedia Network, claims OpenAI infringed on their copyrights and violated the terms of use for their websites.
The legal action, filed Friday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, alleges that OpenAI’s generative AI tool, ChatGPT, has been “scraping” the plaintiffs’ websites on an ongoing basis without authorization. The plaintiffs argue that OpenAI has been using this content to train its language models, thus “unjustly enriching” the company at the expense of the news organizations.
The lawsuit asserts that OpenAI has indiscriminately used valuable journalistic work, without regard for copyright protection or the contractual agreements that govern the use of this content. The complaint highlights that the misappropriated content includes articles that are either exclusively owned or licensed by the news outlets, as well as content licensed from third parties.
“The data and intellectual property illicitly obtained by OpenAI are the product of immense time, effort, and cost invested by the news media companies and their staff,” the lawsuit reads. “Journalistic content is the core product of these companies and the primary driver of their businesses.”
The plaintiffs have proposed two options for damages. One option seeks a share of the profits OpenAI has allegedly gained from the infringement, along with additional damages to be determined during the trial. Alternatively, the companies are requesting a fixed amount of CAD $20,000 (approximately USD $14,000) per work. With each outlet publishing over a million works since 2015, the total damages could amount to billions of dollars.
In addition to monetary compensation, the lawsuit calls for a permanent injunction that would prevent OpenAI and ChatGPT from further infringing on copyright, either directly or indirectly, in the future.
The coalition issued a statement condemning OpenAI’s actions: “Journalism serves the public interest. OpenAI using journalism for commercial gain is illegal.”
In response, OpenAI maintains that its models are trained on publicly available data and that its practices are grounded in fair use and international copyright principles. The company also emphasizes that it works with news publishers to provide attribution and links to their content in ChatGPT searches, offering publishers an option to opt out of this use.
This lawsuit follows a similar case filed last year by The New York Times, which accused OpenAI of copyright infringement by using its journalism to train its AI models. Additionally, a group of prominent authors, including George R.R. Martin and Jonathan Franzen, launched a lawsuit against OpenAI 15 months ago, alleging unauthorized use of their works.
Legal scrutiny surrounding OpenAI is intensifying. Just last week, an Australian government inquiry into AI accused tech companies of committing “unprecedented theft” and referred to them as “pirates.” A separate protest by filmmakers and creators involved in OpenAI’s video-to-text program, Sora, also made headlines, as they accused the company of engaging in “art washing” after leaking an early version of the program.
The Canadian lawsuit is another significant step in the growing legal challenges facing OpenAI as the tech giant continues to face allegations of copyright violations and misuse of creative works.
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