OpenAI Sued by Canadian News Companies for Alleged Copyright Breach
News Mania Desk / Piyal Chatterjee / 30th November 2024
Five Canadian news organizations filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT owner OpenAI on Friday, accusing the artificial intelligence startup of repeatedly violating copyright and online terms of service. The case is one of several cases filed against OpenAI and other tech companies by authors, visual artists, music publishers, and other copyright holders over data used to train generative AI systems. Microsoft is OpenAI’s main supporter.
Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CBC/Radio-Canada issued a statement alleging that OpenAI was scraping vast amounts of content to create its products without permission or compensation to content owners.
“Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal,” they said.
On November 7, a New York federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that it exploited material from Raw Story and AlterNet. In an 84-page statement of claim filed in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice, the five Canadian companies sought damages from OpenAI as well as a permanent injunction prohibiting it from utilizing their material without consent.
“Rather than seek to obtain the information legally, OpenAI has elected to brazenly misappropriate the News Media Companies’ valuable intellectual property and convert it for its own uses, including commercial uses, without consent or consideration,” they said in the filing. “The News Media Companies have never received from OpenAI any form of consideration, including payment, in exchange for OpenAI’s use of their Works.”
In response, OpenAI said its models were trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that were fair for creators.
“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,” a spokesperson said via email.
The Canadian news companies’ document did not mention Microsoft. This month, billionaire Elon Musk expanded a lawsuit against OpenAI to include Microsoft, alleging the two companies illegally sought to monopolize the market for generative AI and sideline competitors.
