Top Canadian publishers sue OpenAI, joining AI copyright fight

A group of prominent Canadian news organizations sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Friday, extending the fight over artificial intelligence and copyright beyond the United States.

The lawsuit, brought by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Globe and Mail, Canadian Press and newspaper owners Torstar and Postmedia, alleges that OpenAI illegally scraped their content and used it to train its AI tools. Similar lawsuits have been launched in the United States by the New York Times and other newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News.

The lawsuit, filed Friday in Ontario Superior Court, signals that the battle over using copyrighted work to train AI will continue, spreading to jurisdictions outside the United States and into countries that have been less accommodating to the desires of American tech companies. In the United States, news organizations have split on how to respond to AI companies, with some suing and other deciding to sign deals with OpenAI to license their content to the company.

The AI algorithms behind products like ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of data taken from the public internet. AI companies, including OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, who’ve all launched AI products, insist that this practice is legal under fair use, a concept in copyright law that allows the re-use of copyrighted material if it is sufficiently altered. Canadian copyright law has a similar concept, called fair dealing.

But a growing group of news organizations, authors, musicians and artists have been suing AI companies over the use of their content in training, saying they never gave permission or received payment and that the new AI tools could be used to compete with them and even put them out of business. AI companies, including OpenAI and Google, have also begun using AI to summarize websites directly in their own sites, potentially upending the economics of the World Wide Web.

“OpenAI’s public statements that it is somehow fair or in the public interest for them to use other companies’ intellectual property for their own commercial gain is wrong,” the Canadian news organizations said in a joint statement. “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”

A spokesperson for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Canada has been at the center of fights over Big Tech and journalism before. In 2023, Canada passed a law forcing Google and Meta to pay for news posted on their platforms, triggering a massive battle with the two Big Tech companies that led to Meta permanently blocking news on its apps in the country.