Canadian news organizations, including CBC, sue ChatGPT creator

A group of Canadian news outlets, including CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, Metroland, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press have launched a joint lawsuit claiming copyright infringement against ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

The lawsuit was filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Friday morning and is looking for punitive damages from OpenAI, along with payment of any profits that the company made from using news articles from the organizations.

It's also seeking an injunction banning OpenAI from using their news articles in the future.

WATCH | U.S. media companies sue OpenAI in late 2023:

New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for copyright infringement

11 months ago

Duration 1:47

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using millions of the newspaper's articles without permission to help train artificial intelligence technologies.

In a statement, the companies wrote "OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners," and claim that OpenAI "regularly breaches copyright" by using content from Canadian media outlets for products such as ChatGPT.

When asked if CBC would stop its employees from using tools such as ChatGPT as a result of the lawsuit, a spokesperson for the Crown corporation declined to answer and referred to the joint statement from the journalistic outlets.

Canadian action comes 11 months after U.S. lawsuit

In a statement emailed to CBC News, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company's models are trained on data that is publicly available and said the company is "grounded" in international copyright principles.

"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," wrote OpenAI.

In the Canadian lawsuit, the domestic media outlets claim that OpenAI has been "well aware of its obligations to obtain a valid licence" to use their content.

That lawsuit is still ongoing, with the Times claiming in April that OpenAI had potentially erased search results that the newspaper may need for its case.

OpenAI's value has been estimated at $157 billion US in recent months.

Is it just reading an article if AI does it?

Media and technology researcher Richard Lachman points out that companies such as OpenAI claim using publicly available news articles to train an artificial intelligence isn't off base.

"The argument of the companies is, 'We're essentially reading the news that was on a public website. That's not illegal. A human can read the news,'" said Lachman, an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan Unversity's RTA School of Media.

"Of course, companies push back and say, 'You're not reading the news, you are scraping information. And that's against our terms of service,'" added Lachman.

Lachman compared the situation to a recent offer from a major book publisher to pay authors $2,500 to use their work in training artificial intelligence, pointing out that companies realize there is money at stake when content is used by technology companies.

"Clearly, there's value. The question is, what is that value? … I don't know exactly how that calculation happens," he said.

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