A coalition of Canadian news organizations has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright infringement and unjust enrichment. The plaintiffs, including prominent outlets such as the Toronto Star, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and the Globe and Mail, are seeking monetary damages and a court order to prevent OpenAI from further using their content without compensation.
The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been trained on content scraped from these companies’ websites, content which the media companies argue is the product of significant investment by their teams of journalists, editors, and staff. The news organizations claim that instead of obtaining this information legally, OpenAI has exploited their intellectual property without consent or payment, profiting from it commercially.
This lawsuit is not the first of its kind. OpenAI is already facing similar legal challenges from major outlets such as The New York Times, the New York Daily News, and individual creators, including comedian Sarah Silverman. However, the Canadian media companies assert that, unlike others, they have never received compensation or a licensing deal from OpenAI in exchange for the use of their content.
In response, an OpenAI spokesperson defended the company’s practices, stating that ChatGPT is trained on publicly available data and operates within the bounds of fair use principles. The spokesperson emphasized OpenAI’s collaborations with publishers such as The Associated Press and Le Monde, which involve licensing agreements and the option for publishers to opt-out of having their content used by the AI models.
This legal battle follows a recent study by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which found that no publisher, whether affiliated with OpenAI or not, was immune to inaccurate representations of its content in ChatGPT.
For more details, read the full story here.