Canadian publishers suing OpenAI for copyright infringement

A group of Canadian news and media companies filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last Friday, accusing the ChatGPT developer of infringing their copyrights. The publishers are demanding financial damages.

The Toronto Star, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), The Globe and Mail, Postmedia Network, The Canadian Press and other Canadian media companies claim in their joint complaint that OpenAI has violated their copyrights and terms of use on an ongoing basis by “accessing, copying, and/or scraping the news media companies’ content in response to user prompts”.

In addition, OpenAI has used the content of the Canadian news media companies to train the large language model (LLM) that powers ChatGPT.

“The data and intellectual property illicitly obtained by OpenAI is the product of immense time, effort, and cost on behalf of the news media companies and their journalists, editors, and staff. The news media companies’ content is their core product and the driving force of their respective businesses,” the lawsuit states.

The complaint continues. “Rather than seek to obtain the information legally, OpenAI has elected to brazenly misappropriate the news media companies’ valuable intellectual property and convert it for its own uses, including commercial uses, without consent or consideration.”

The plaintiffs are demanding financial, punitive and exemplary damages of the profits OpenAI made from using the publishers’ articles. They propose compensation of 20,000 Canadian dollars (approximately €13,500) for each article that OpenAI has unlawfully used.

Furthermore, the news media companies also want the ChatGPT developer to be permanently banned from using the organizations’ content without prior permission.

An OpenAI spokesperson says that there’s no wrongdoing on their part and that its models are “trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation”.

“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,” he said in a statement.

The Canadian news media companies aren’t the only ones suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. In December 2023, The New York Times was the first news organization to sue OpenAI for violating its copyright.

Earlier this year, several US news sites and newspapers like The Intercept, Raw Story, the New York Daily News, and the Chicago Tribune also decided to file lawsuits against the ChatGPT maker. Some lawsuits have already been dismissed because the publishers couldn’t prove that they were harmed by the alleged copyright violations.