Several Canadian media companies have filed a joint lawsuit against American AI company OpenAI. The lawsuit claims that OpenAI has illegally used news articles to train its AI models. The media companies are now seeking “punitive damage” and a share of the profit made by OpenAI by using these copyrighted materials.
“OpenAI regularly breaches copyright and online terms of use by scraping large swaths of content from Canadian media to help develop its products, such as ChatGPT,” the news organizations said in a joint statement. The news companies added, “The plaintiffs bring this action to prevent and seek recompense for these unlawful activities”.
The CBC, the Mail, Metroland Media and Postmedia, the Globe, and the Toronto Star are among the litigants behind this case.
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OpenAI And Copyright Infringement
OpenAI is a San Francisco-based AI company famous for the creation of Chat GPT, an AI-powered chatbot. To train such software, companies require large amounts of data, most of which they acquire from the Internet. This has led to multiple claims of copyright infringement from different parties.
In 2023, OpenAI, along with Microsoft, was subject to another case filed by The New York Times. This latest lawsuit is demanding up to $20,000 Canadian dollars per article claimed to be violating copyright. This could potentially add up to billions of dollars in damages. The companies also want an injection that would prevent OpenAI from using their intellectual properties in the future.
One spokesperson from OpenAI provided a statement to The New York Times, stating “We have not yet had the opportunity to review the allegations. Our models are trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation”.
