A group of major Canadian news media companies are suing ChatGPT creator OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement.

The broad coalition, which includes the Toronto Star, the Globe and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, accuses OpenAI of taking large swaths of their work, “indiscriminately and without regard for copyright protection” to train its GPT models.

Filing the lawsuit on 28 November at the Toronto Superior Court of Justice, the plaintiffs, who are responsible for generating the “bulk of Canada’s journalistic content”, allege OpenAI scraped content from their websites and third parties to develop its generative AI models.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs say the scraping and reproduction process engaged in by OpenAI to train their models “infringed, authorised, and/or induced the infringement of”, the copyright of the news media companies’ works.

The plaintiffs, who are being represented by disputes firm Lenczner Slaght, say OpenAI has elected to "brazenly misappropriate” the news media companies’ valuable intellectual property and convert it for its own uses, including commercial uses, without consent or consideration.

As of October 2024, OpenAI was valued at $157bn.

The group include daily print broadsheets to round-the-clock digital news coverage. Collectively, they have millions of digital and print readers worldwide.

The media organisations released a joint statement stating: “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”

In response to the lawsuit, an OpenAI spokesperson told Canadian Lawyer: “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.

The spokesperson added: “We collaborate closely with news publishers, including in the display, attribution, and links to their content in ChatGPT search, and offer them easy ways to opt out should they so desire." 

The media companies are seeking damages and/or an order for OpenAI to give up some of its profits to compensate them for the “wrongful misappropriation of their works” as well as permanent injunctive relief. They are seeking statutory damages in the amount of C$20,000 per work for the copyright infringement.

The Toronto-based Lenczner Slaght team includes managing partner Monique Jilesen, partner Sana Halwani, and associates Jim Lepore, Jessica Kras and Devon Kapoor.

AI companies like OpenAI have faced a slew of lawsuits from novelists and performers including Sarah Silverman and The New York Times who have accused them of using their copyrightable material without their permission to train their large language models.

But other media organisations have taken a different tack. In the UK in April, the Financial Times struck a “strategic partnership” and licensing agreement with OpenAI. OpenAI has also signed a deal to bring news content from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Times and the Sunday Times to the AI platform.

In April, the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act was introduced to the US House of Representatives. This would require AI companies to disclose all of the copyrighted work they used to train their generative AI models.