Canadian news organizations sue OpenAI

A gaggle of Canadian news and media firms filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI, alleging that the creator of ChatGPT infringed their copyrights and unjustly enriched himself at their expense.

The firms behind the lawsuit include the Toronto Star, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Globe and Mail and others, who’re searching for monetary damages and a ban on OpenAI from continuing to make use of their work.

The news firms said OpenAI used content pulled from their web sites to coach large language models that support ChatGPT — content that’s “the product of enormous time, effort and costs incurred by the News Media Companies and their journalists, editors, and staff.”

The firms wrote of their lawsuit that “instead of seeking to obtain the information legally, OpenAI chose to brazenly appropriate the valuable intellectual property of the News Media companies and transform it for its own purposes, including commercial purposes, without consent or compensation.”

OpenAI also faces copyright lawsuits from The New York Times, New York Daily News, YouTube creators and authors including comedian Sarah Silverman.

Although OpenAI has signed licensing agreements with publishers corresponding to The Associated Press, Axel Springer and Le Monde, the businesses behind the brand new lawsuit said they “never received any form of remuneration, including payment, from OpenAI in exchange for OpenAI’s use of their factory.” “

An OpenAI spokesman said in an announcement that ChatGPT is utilized by “hundreds of millions of people around the world… to improve their everyday lives, inspire creativity and solve difficult problems” and that its models are “trained on publicly available data, based on fair use and related international copyright rules which can be fair to creators and support innovation.”

“We work closely with news publishers, including displaying, attributing and linking to their content on the ChatGPT search engine, and offering them easy ways to opt-out if they wish to do so,” the spokesperson said.

The latest lawsuit comes shortly after Columbia University’s Center for Digital Journalism released a study that found that “no publisher – regardless of their degree of affiliation with OpenAI – was spared from inaccurately representing their content on ChatGPT.”