Five Canadian news media companies launched a legal action on Friday against ChatGPT owner OpenAI, accusing the artificial intelligence company of routinely violating copyright and online terms of use.
This lawsuit joins a growing wave of legal challenges targeting OpenAI and other tech companies by authors, visual artists, music publishers, and other copyright holders over data used to train generative AI systems. OpenAI’s main backer, Microsoft (MSFT.O), plays a significant role in this context.
Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC/Radio-Canada directly accused OpenAI of scraping vast amounts of content to develop its products without obtaining permission or compensating content owners. “Journalism serves the public interest. OpenAI exploits other companies’ journalism for its own commercial gain, which is illegal,” they asserted in a joint statement.
On November 7, a New York federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against OpenAI that alleged it misused articles from news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet.
In an 84-page statement of claim filed in Ontario’s superior court of justice, the five Canadian companies demanded damages and a permanent injunction to stop OpenAI from using their material without consent. They stated, “OpenAI deliberately misappropriates the News Media Companies’ valuable intellectual property and converts it for its own purposes, including commercial ones, without consent or compensation.”
The companies emphasized that OpenAI never provided any form of compensation, including payment, for using their work.
In response, OpenAI defended its practices, explaining that it trained its models on publicly available data under fair use principles and related international copyright frameworks. “We work closely with news publishers to display, attribute, and link their content in ChatGPT search and provide them with simple ways to opt out if they wish,” a spokesperson stated via email.
The Canadian news companies’ filing did not mention Microsoft. However, earlier this month, Elon Musk expanded a lawsuit against OpenAI to include Microsoft, accusing both companies of illegally working to monopolize the generative AI market and sideline competitors.
