Canada’s top news outlets have filed a possibly billion-dollar lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the tech company is “strip-mining journalism” and unfairly benefiting from using news articles to train its well-known ChatGPT software.
The lawsuit, filed on Friday in Ontario’s superior court of justice, demands a portion of OpenAI’s earnings from exploiting the news organizations’ stories, punitive damages, and an order prohibiting the San Francisco-based business from using any news pieces.
According to the president of News Media Canada, Paul Deegan, “These AI companies are free-riding on the backs of news publishers who invest real money to employ real journalists who produce real stories for real people and cannibalize proprietary content.”
“They are severely, unfairly, and illegally enriching themselves at the expense of publishers while undermining journalism.”
The lawsuit involves the Globe and Mail, the Canadian Press, the CBC, the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, and Postmedia. The parties demand penalties of up to C$20,000 for every piece OpenAI uses, implying that a legal victory may be worth billions.
“The defendants have been involved in the ongoing, deliberate, and unauthorized misappropriation of the plaintiffs’ valuable news media works.” The news organizations’ statement of claim stated that the plaintiffs are bringing this action to prevent and seek compensation for these unlawful activities.
“OpenAI intentionally “scrapes” (i.e., accesses and copies) content from the websites of news media corporations to acquire the substantial quantities of text data required to develop their GPT models… It subsequently employs that proprietary content to create GPT models without obtaining consent or authorization.
There has been no legal testing of any of the claims.
The lawsuit is the most recent in a series of legal disputes between Canadian media and American tech firms, including a sour spat with Facebook’s parent company, Meta. The New York Times is one of the several news organizations in the US that have sued OpenAI.
OpenAI, valued at over $150 billion, has already inked licensing deals with a few media companies, such as NewsCorp, Condé Nast, and the Associated Press wire service.
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