Canadian news organizations sue OpenAI for ChatGPT copyright infringement

A coalition of Canadian news outlets sued OpenAI on Friday for copyright infringement. The joint lawsuit accuses the company of “capitalizing and profiting” from the unauthorized use of their content for ChatGPT. The legal action was filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

The plaintiffs include CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, Metroland, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press. They’re seeking punitive damages from OpenAI, payments for any profits the ChatGPT creator made from using their news articles and a ban on further use of their content.

“OpenAI regularly breaches copyright and online terms of use by scraping large swaths of content from Canadian media to help develop its products, such as ChatGPT,” the media outlets wrote in a statement (via CBC News). “OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners.”

In a statement to Engadget, OpenAI noted its news content partnerships and opt-out process while voicing a belief that its practices are covered under fair use.

“Hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on ChatGPT to improve their daily lives, inspire creativity, and solve hard problems,” an OpenAI spokesperson wrote. “Our 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.”

OpenAI’s new search engine is built into ChatGPT. It crawls websites and points users toward them for additional info. The company has said it doesn’t use that data for crawling or training its models.

The Canadian news outlets have joined a long list of companies, individuals, and other organizations that have sued the ChatGPT maker for unauthorized training on their work. That list includes (among others) The New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, a group of nonfiction authors and the comedian Sarah Silverman.

Early this year, OpenAI wrote to a UK committee that it would be “impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.” This month, the NYT filed a court declaration as part of its lawsuit, stating that OpenAI’s engineers accidentally erased evidence of the company’s AI training data.

OpenAI has argued that using publicly available online content falls under the fair use doctrine. The Canadian plaintiffs objected to that view, writing that “journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”