Canadian News Publishers Sue OpenAI for Alleged Copyright Infringement – The Week

Ottawa, Dec 1 (AP) A coalition of Canadian news publishers, including The Canadian Press, Torstar, Globe and Mail, Postmedia and CBC/Radio-Canada, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for using news content to train its generative artificial intelligence ChatGPT system.
The publics said in a joint statement Friday that OpenAI regularly violates copyright by removing large amounts of content from Canadian media.
“OpenAI exploits and profits from the use of this content without obtaining permission or compensating the content owners,” the statement said.
Publishers argue that OpenAI’s practices undermine the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in journalism and that the content is protected by copyright.
“News media companies welcome technological innovations. However, all participants must comply with the law and any use of intellectual property must be on fair terms,” ​​the statement said.
Generative AI can create text, images, video and computer code based on a simple prompt, but systems must first study large amounts of existing content.
OpenAI said in a statement that its models are trained on publicly available data. It said they were “grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair to creators and supportive of innovation.”
The company said it works “closely with news publishers, including in displaying, attributing and linking to their content in ChatGPT search” and offers outlets “easy ways to opt out if they wish to do so”.
This is the first such case in Canada, although numerous lawsuits are ongoing in the United States, including a New York Times case against OpenAI and Microsoft.
Some news organizations have chosen to collaborate rather than fight OpenAI, signing contracts to be compensated for sharing news content that can be used to train their AI systems.
The Associated Press is among the news organizations that have entered into licensing agreements in the past year with OpenAI. Others include The Wall Street Journal and New York Post publisher News Corp., The Atlantic, Axel Springer in Germany and Prisa Media in Spain, French newspaper Le Monde and the London-based Financial Times.
Canada has passed a law requiring Google and Meta to compensate news publishers for the use of their content, but has previously declined to say whether the Online News Act should apply to use by AI systems.
In response to the legislation, Meta pulled news from its platforms in Canada, while Google reached a settlement to pay C$100 million ($71 million) to Canadian news outlets. (AP)

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