Canadian news outlets sue OpenAI claiming damages of $14k per ‘scraped’ article
OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT is said to regularly ‘scrape’ Canadian news websites (photo: Unsplash)
Canadian news organisations including CBC News, the Globe and Mail and Canadian Press are collectively suing OpenAI, alleging the artificial intelligence (AI) giant infringed its copyright and used their journalistic content without authorisation.
The coalition, which also includes the Toronto Star, Metroland Media Group and Postmedia Network, is accusing OpenAI of “infringing, authorising and/or inducing the infringement” of its copyright, breaching the terms of use for its websites and “unjustly enriching themselves at the expense of” the news entities.
The suit, filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Friday, asserts that OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT “scrapes” the Canadian news websites on an “ongoing” basis “without consent or authorisation” to train its language models.
“OpenAI has taken large swaths of valuable work, indiscriminately and without regard for copyright protection or the contractual terms of use applicable to the misappropriated content,” said the lawsuit.
“The misappropriated content includes works that the news media companies own or exclusively license as well as works that they non-exclusively license from other third parties.
“The data and intellectual property illicitly obtained by OpenAI is the product of immense time, effort and cost on behalf of the news media companies and their journalists, editors and staff. The news media companies’ content is their core product and the driving force of their respective businesses.”
The collective has put forward a couple of options in terms of the damages it is seeking. Under the first, the news outlets are seeking “part of the profits that the defendants have made” from the alleged copyright infringement, in addition to damages that will be determined during trial.
Alternatively, the companies have proposed damages of C$20,000 (US$14,000) “per work” or another amount that the judge considers appropriate.
According to the suit, each of the news outlets has published more than one million “works” since 2015, meaning the damages it is seeking stretch into multiple billions of dollars.
The suit also demands a “permanent injunction restraining” OpenAI and ChatGPT from “directly or indirectly” infringing copyright in the future.
In a statement released on Friday, the coalition added: “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”
OpenAI responded that its “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 San Francisco-headquartered company added that it works “closely with news publishers, including in the display, attribution and links to their content in ChatGPT search, and offers them easy ways to opt out should they so desire.”
Late last year, the New York Times took a similar measure, suing OpenAI for copyright infringement and the unauthorised use of its journalism to train its large language models. In addition, a group of authors including George RR Martin and Jonathan Franzen sued OpenAI 15 months ago.
The Canadian lawsuit comes as legal scrutiny of OpenAI continues to mount. Last week, an Australian government inquiry into AI found tech companies were committing “unprecedented theft,” dubbing them as “pirates.”
Also last week, a group of filmmakers and creators that had received exclusive early access to OpenAI’s video-to-text program Sora staged a protest by leaking a version of it, accusing the AI giant of luring them into “art washing.”
