Five major Canadian media organizations filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the AI company used their content without permission to train ChatGPT.
The lawsuit, filed by Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC/Radio-Canada, alleges OpenAI used their copyrighted content without authorization to train its AI models used in ChatGPT.
According to the lawsuit, "To obtain the significant quantities of text data needed to develop their GPT models, OpenAI deliberately 'scrapes' (i.e., accesses and copies) content from the News Media Companies' websites, web-based applications, and/or the websites of their Third Party Partners. It then uses that proprietary content to develop its GPT models, without consent or authorization. OpenAI also augments its models on an ongoing basis by accessing, copying, and/or scraping the News Media Companies' content in response to user prompts."
The media companies say they spend "hundreds of millions of dollars" creating news content in both English and French, which OpenAI then uses systematically without compensation for its own commercial purposes.
"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," the media companies said in a joint statement.
"Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies' journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It's illegal."
While the Canadian media organizations say they support technological innovation, they insist all parties must follow existing laws and use intellectual property fairly.
Media companies suing
This Canadian lawsuit joins several similar lawsuits. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, seeking billions in damages and demanding the destruction of AI models trained on its articles.
Eight US publishers, including the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune, have also filed suit, claiming OpenAI and Microsoft "stole" millions of copyrighted articles.
The legal landscape remains complex. A New York federal judge recently threw out a lawsuit filed by news sites Raw Story and AlterNet against OpenAI. The judge sided with Big AI's fair use argument and found that the plaintiffs couldn't prove they were sufficiently harmed. The news sites may still appeal the decision.
The Intercept, however, gained partial success in a very similar case when its lawsuit alleging violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was allowed to proceed. That suit claims OpenAI removed copyright management information like titles and author names without permission.
OpenAI's media partnerships raise concerns
OpenAI has started making deals with select media outlets, which journalism researcher Jeff Jarvis recently described as hush money. He suggests these tech companies are trying to buy publishers' silence in legal disputes and legislative processes, calling it "pure lobbying."
Jarvis warns these exclusive partnerships could harm smaller, local, and independent publications that can't access AI technologies or be found by AI apps, potentially threatening journalism's future.
