OpenAI Sued by Top Canadian News Publishers Over Copyright

(Bloomberg) — Five Canadian news media publishers have sued OpenAI Inc. for breaching copyright by scraping content to train artificial intelligence products like ChatGPT — opening another front against the $157 billion startup.

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Torstar Corp., Postmedia Network Canada Corp., Globe and Mail Inc., the Canadian Press and CBC/Radio-Canada filed the action Thursday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, seeking damages that would be determined at trial.

“OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners,” the publishers said in a statement Friday. The plaintiffs say they are responsible for the “bulk of Canada’s journalistic content.”

An OpenAI spokesperson said its models are trained on “publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles.” The company also said it works with news publishers on how their content is displayed, attributed and linked, including ways to opt out.

Late last year, New York Times Co. sued OpenAI and its partner, software giant Microsoft Corp., alleging the firms relied on millions of its copyrighted articles to train their AI systems.

Paul Deegan, president of trade group News Media Canada, which represents the newspaper-publishing plaintiffs, said OpenAI was “strip mining journalism while substantially, unjustly, and unlawfully enriching themselves.”

(Updates with ChatGPT comment in fourth paragraph and trade group comment in sixth paragraph.)

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