Several Canadian news publishers have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI
Canadian news publishers including the Globe and Mail, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the Toronto Star have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the tech giant of infringing copyright law and unjustly enriching itself at the expense of the plaintiffs and the journalists they employ.
On Friday, some of Canada's major news organizations—the Globe and Mail, the Canadian Press, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, and Postmedia—filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice. The news companies are accusing OpenAI of "strip-mining journalism", unjustly profiting from the content it has unlawfully scraped to train its models.
The plaintiffs are looking for up to C$20,000 in damages for each article used by OpenAI, a share of the company's profits earned since training its models with the publishers' content, and an injunction to forbid OpenAI from using the news organizations' articles for training in the future. This makes the lawsuit potentially worth billions. As has become the norm, a spokesperson for OpenAI has since defended that its models are "trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation."
Canada's publishers have recently been involved in several battles with US-based tech companies. As a response to Canada's Online News Act, a law that was approved last year to ensure that news outlets were appropriately compensated when digital platforms made use of their content, Meta and Google, the only companies big enough to fall within the scope of the law, threatened to pull Canadian news outlets' from their platforms. The Canadian government negotiated an agreement with Google, but Meta has blocked access to global news publishers' content for Canadian users through Facebook and Instagram. Likewise, Canadian news outlets can publish content on their Facebook and Instagram accounts, but the content is solely displayed to users outside of Canada.
