Canadian News Outlets File Lawsuit Against OpenAI
On Friday, a coalition of Canadian media and news organizations initiated legal action against OpenAI, claiming that the developer of ChatGPT has violated their copyrights and unfairly profited from their work.
The plaintiffs in this lawsuit include notable entities such as the Toronto Star, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the Globe and Mail, among others, who aim to secure financial compensation and prevent OpenAI from utilizing their intellectual property in the future.
The news organizations assert that OpenAI has leveraged content sourced from their websites to train the extensive language models that underpin ChatGPT—content that represents “significant time, effort, and costs invested by the News Media Companies, their journalists, editors, and staff.”
In their legal filing, the companies contend, “Instead of obtaining the necessary information legally, OpenAI has chosen to arrogantly misappropriate the valuable intellectual property of the News Media Companies and repurpose it for its own, including commercial, interests, without any permission or compensation.”
OpenAI is currently confronting copyright lawsuits from various parties, including The New York Times, New York Daily News, creators on YouTube, and literary figures such as comedian Sarah Silverman.
Though OpenAI has established licensing agreements with publishers like The Associated Press, Axel Springer, and Le Monde, the plaintiffs in this case allege that they have “never received any form of consideration from OpenAI, including payment, in exchange for the use of their works.”
A representative from OpenAI stated that ChatGPT is utilized by “hundreds of millions of individuals globally … to enhance their everyday lives, spur creativity, and tackle challenging issues,” emphasizing that its models are “trained on publicly available data, adhering to fair use and pertinent international copyright standards that favor creators and promote innovation.”
The spokesperson added, “We maintain close collaboration with news publishers, including displaying, attributing, and providing links to their content in ChatGPT searches, and we offer straightforward opt-out options should they wish to do so.”
This newly filed lawsuit arises shortly after the publication of a study by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which revealed that “no publisher—irrespective of its connections to OpenAI—was free from inaccurate portrayals of its content in ChatGPT.”