In an unprecedented move, a group of Canada's most prominent news organizations is suing OpenAI for unlawfully using their content.  

Five of Canada’s leading media organizations, including publishers of its top newspapers, major newswires, and the national broadcaster, collectively filed the lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Friday morning, in a first for the country. 

Responding to the lawsuit, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company has not reviewed the allegations yet but maintained that its "models are trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation."

The lawsuit, filed by Canada's The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, CBC, and more, is seeking 20,000 Canadian dollars ($14,700) per article, amounting to billions of dollars in damages. They news outlets are also seeking shares of profits gained by OpenAI from its alleged misuse of their content and requested that the company end its utilization of their publications. 

"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 84-page lawsuit stated, with a focus on the alleged misuse of articles to train the artificial intelligence bot. 

The lawsuit further alleges that OpenAI disregarded the Canadian media outlets' use of technological and legal measures, such as the Robot Exclusion Protocol, copyright notices, and paywalls, designed to prevent scraping and unauthorized copying of their content.

American precedent

The case mirrors a precedent in the United States, when The New York Times filed a copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, the first of its kind from a renowned American news outlet, under the allegations of unfair competition that threatens the free press society. 

The NYT demanded “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages for their unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works,” from a Manhattan court where the case is being held, adding that the defendants destroyed the chatbot models that have used their material as it is copyrighted. 

It was argued that the defendants have been utilizing the NYT's massive investment in journalistic pursuit, without paying forward for the material, to sway audiences away from the Times and closer to their content. 

Moreover, it was also stated that Microsoft has made substantial investments, 13 billion dollars to be precise, into OpenAI, and infused it with their personal search engine Bing. Consequentially, Bing, powered with OpenAI, has resulted in content “reproduced almost verbatim” from the Times but had not credited the news outlet, to boost revenue. 

“If The Times and other news organizations cannot produce and protect their independent journalism, there will be a vacuum that no computer or artificial intelligence can fill. Less journalism will be produced, and the cost to society will be enormous,” the lawsuit claimed. 

The journal had tried to resolve the issue with OpenAI and Microsoft back in April but in vain. In comparison, other media outlets, like the Associated Press, and Axel Springer, the owner of Business Insider and Politico, have previously reached agreements with OpenAI that allow the intelligence bot to recycle their content.