A group of major Canadian news organisations has sued OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, for allegedly using their articles illegally to train its artificial intelligence software.
The coalition includes well-known media outlets such as the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC. This is reportedly the first lawsuit of its kind in Canada according to BBC.
In a joint statement, the media organisations said, “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”
OpenAI, however, stated that its AI models rely on “publicly available data” and are grounded in “fair use and related international copyright principles.” The company also said, “We collaborate closely with news publishers, including in the display, attribution, and links to their content in ChatGPT search, and offer them easy ways to opt out should they so desire.”
The 84-page lawsuit accuses OpenAI of bypassing copyright protections, such as paywalls and disclaimers, to scrape content from Canadian media.
The media group claims, “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.”
They are seeking punitive damages of C$20,000 per article allegedly used, which could amount to billions of dollars. The group also wants OpenAI to share profits made from their articles and to be prohibited from using them in the future.
This lawsuit is similar to legal actions against OpenAI in the US, where publishers like the New York Times and the Authors Guild have also accused the company of copyright violations.
