The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation office in Toronto. It, along with other major news outlets, claims OpenAI is illegally using their content.
Credit...Geoff Robins/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Major Canadian News Outlets Sue OpenAI In New Copyright Case

A coalition of some of Canada’s biggest media companies is seeking billions of dollars in compensation for what they say is copyright infringement on their work through ChatGPT.

by · NY Times

A coalition of Canada’s biggest news organizations is suing OpenAI, the maker of the artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, accusing the company of illegally using their content in the first case of its kind in the country.

Five of the country’s major news companies, including the publishers of its top newspapers, newswires and the national broadcaster, filed the joint suit in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Friday morning.

While this is the first such lawsuit in Canada, it is similar to a suit brought against OpenAI and Microsoft in the United States in 2023 by The New York Times, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.

In response to the Canadian lawsuit, a spokesman for OpenAI said “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 Canadian outlets, which include the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the CBC — the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — are seeking what could add up to billions of dollars in damages. They are asking for 20,000 Canadian dollars, or $14,700, per article they claim was illegally scraped and used to train ChatGPT.

They are also seeking a share of the profits made by what they claim is OpenAI’s misuse of their content, as well as for the company to stop such practices 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,” they added. “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”

The 84-page lawsuit focuses on what it says is the unlawful use of journalism produced by these news organizations to train OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT.

It accuses OpenAI of ignoring the Canadian news outlets’ use of specific technological and legal tools — such the Robot Exclusion Protocol, copyright disclaimers and paywalls — in place to prevent scraping or other types of unauthorized copying of their published content.

The lawsuit in Canada comes after The Times and other publishers pursued their own legal cases in the United States. In another case, also from 2023, the Authors Guild and a coalition of major authors such as John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen have similarly claimed copyright infringement against the company and its signature product, ChatGPT.

The New York Times case, which is currently in discovery, also names Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s largest funder, provides the computing power needed to build OpenAI’s chatbots, uses its chatbot technology and may help gather data used to train that chatbot technology.

That case focuses on what the Times says is both the illegal use of content to train ChatGPT and the use of that content for the production of search results.

By contrast, the Canadian case focuses on the training part and does not name Microsoft. Sana Halwani, a partner at the Canadian law firm Lenczner Slaght, which represents the media organizations in the lawsuit, said there were a number of factors that determined the focus of their case.

“We believe we have a strong case related to the training of the models. The training of the models is the core of the problem,” Ms. Halwani said on Friday.

The Canadian publishers could find some of their claims easier to prove than others, with copyright infringement being the toughest, according to Lisa Macklem, a lecturer King’s University College at Western University in Ontario, who is an expert in copyright and media law.

“While it seems obvious that OpenAI is infringing copyright, it is technically very difficult to prove, and this underscores the immediate and pressing need to have regulations put in place, demanding, at the very least, transparency on what is in the training data of generative AI,” she said.

The legal battles by prominent publishers and authors have been compounded by a high-profile lawsuit brought over the summer against the company and its founders on separate grounds by Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left in acrimony in 2018.

Mr. Musk’s lawsuit claims that OpenAI and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, breached the company’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good. OpenAI has described Mr. Musk’s claims as meritless.

The company raised $6.6 billion in its latest funding round in October against a valuation of $157 billion.

Cade Metz contributed reporting from San Francisco.

The World of Elon Musk

The billionaire’s portfolio includes the world’s most valuable automaker, an innovative rocket company and plenty of drama.