Canadian News Outlets Sue OpenAI Over Copyright Infringement

A coalition of five of Canada’s biggest news media companies filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT’s owner, OpenAI. The suit, filed on November 28th, alleges that OpenAI illegally used copyrighted material to train its large language models (LLMs), breaching the companies’ terms of service to collect it.

The coalition includes Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC/Radio-Canada. The filing states that these five news outlets “are responsible for generating the bulk of Canada’s journalistic content.”

Other claims included in the filing also state that OpenAI deliberately circumvented technological protections placed on the companies’ websites to avoid “crawling” by bots like the ones used by OpenAI to gather online data, breached the websites’ terms of service, and reproduced copyrighted material for profit.

In a joint statement released the day of the filing, the coalition declared: “OpenAI’s public statements that it is somehow fair or in the public interest for them to use other companies’ intellectual property for their own commercial gain is wrong. Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”

However, OpenAI argues that it only uses publicly available data, backed by fair use laws. “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,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Al Jazeera.

Should the court find OpenAI liable, the coalition demands statutory damages of up to $20,000 per infringed work, which could amount to billions in total, as well as additional damages and a permanent injunction to stop OpenAI from accessing the media outlets’ copyrighted material in the future.

This is far from the only lawsuit disputing the use of copyrighted work to train LLMs. Last year, the New York Times sued OpenAI over similar concerns, and just a couple of months ago, a group of authors filed a class-action lawsuit against Claude’s Anthropic.

Though this is the first lawsuit of its kind in Canada, it’s far from the only legal proceeding in recent memory aiming to protect the standing of Canadian news companies, which have recently struggled to maintain their ground against other digital outlets. Last year, Meta announced it would stop displaying news content in Canada as a response to the Online News Act.