OpenAI sued by Canadian news companies over alleged copyright violations
Five Canadian news media companies filed legal action against ChatGPT owner OpenAI on Friday, accusing the artificial intelligence company of regularly violating copyright and online terms of use.
The case is part of a wave of lawsuits against OpenAI and other tech companies by authors, visual artists, music publishers and other copyright owners over data used to train generative AI systems. Microsoft is the main backer of OpenAI.
In a statement, Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC/Radio-Canada said OpenAI collected large amounts of content to develop its products without obtaining permission or compensating content owners.
“Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI does not use other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain. It is illegal,” they said.
A federal judge in New York on November 7 dismissed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that it misused articles from the news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet.
In an 84-page claim filed in Ontario Superior Court, the five Canadian companies sought damages from OpenAI and a permanent ban on using their material without permission.
“Rather than attempting to obtain the information through legal means, OpenAI has chosen to blatantly misuse the news media companies’ valuable intellectual property and convert it for its own use, including commercial use, without permission or consideration,” they said them in the submission.
“The news media companies have never received any form of consideration, including payment, from OpenAI in exchange for OpenAI’s use of their works.”
In response, OpenAI said its models were trained on publicly available data, based on fair use and related international copyright principles that were fair to the creators.
“We work closely with news publishers, including on the display, attribution and links to their content in ChatGPT search, and provide them with easy ways to unsubscribe if they wish,” a spokesperson said via e -mail.
The Canadian news companies’ document did not mention Microsoft. This month, billionaire Elon Musk expanded a lawsuit against OpenAI to Microsoft, claiming the two companies were illegally trying to monopolize the market for generative AI and side competitors.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
