Canadian News Companies Sue ChatGPT Maker OpenAI for Repeated Infringement of Copyright Laws

ChatGPT owner OpenAI is set to face lawsuits from five Canadian news companies for frequent violations of copyright and online terms of use. The news companies have joined the long list of companies, artists and authors who have filed lawsuits against OpenAI over allegations of using data to train its AI model. In a joint statement, Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC/Radio-Canada said OpenAI collects large amounts of content to build its products without asking for permission or compensating content creators.

The companies said: “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”

On November 7, a federal judge in New York dismissed a lawsuit filed against OpenAI that accused the company of improperly using articles from Raw Story and AlterNet. Meanwhile, in an 84-page application filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, five Canadian media companies are seeking damages from OpenAI and an injunction to stop the company from using its content without permission.

They added: “Instead of seeking to obtain the information legally, OpenAI chose to eagerly appropriate the valuable intellectual property of news media companies and convert it for its own uses, including commercial uses, without consent or consideration. The News Companies have never received any form of consideration from OpenAI, including payment, in exchange for OpenAI’s use of their Works.”

OpenAI Answers

In its defense, OpenAI stated that its models were trained using publicly available data, in accordance with fair use and international copyright guidelines that it considers fair to content creators. Reuters quoted an OpenAI spokesperson as saying: “We work closely with news publishers, including displaying, attributing and linking to their content in ChatGPT search, and provide easy ways for them to opt out if they wish to do so.”

The document from Canadian news companies makes no reference to Microsoft. However, this month billionaire Elon Musk expanded his lawsuit against OpenAI to include Microsoft, accusing the two companies of illegally trying to dominate the generative artificial intelligence market and push out competitors.