Canadian media companies sued OpenAI

A group of Canadian news and media companies filed a lawsuit Friday against OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT maker violated their copyrights and unjustly enriched itself at their expense.

The companies suing include the Toronto Star, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Globe and Mail, and others who want to win monetary damages and prevent OpenAI from using their work further.

The news companies said OpenAI used content extracted from their websites to train the large linguistic models that power ChatGPT — content that is “the product of significant time, effort, and expense on behalf of the News Company and their reporters, editors, and staff.”

The companies wrote in their statement that “rather than seeking to obtain information legally, OpenAI has chosen to misuse the intellectual property of News Media Companies and transform it for its own use, including commercial use, without permission or consideration.”

OpenAI is also facing copyright lawsuits from the New York Times, New York Daily News, YouTube creators, and writers including comedian Sarah Silverman.

While OpenAI has signed licensing agreements with publishers such as the Associated Press, Axel Springer, and Le Monde, the companies that filed the new suit say they “never received from OpenAI any kind of consideration, including payment, for OpenAI to use It Works .”

An OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement that ChatGPT is used by “hundreds of millions of people around the world … fair use and international copyright principles suit creators and support innovation.”

“We work closely with news publishers, including display, attribution and links to their content in ChatGPT search, and provide them with easy opt-outs if they wish,” a spokesperson said.

This new lawsuit comes shortly after Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism published a study that found “no publisher — regardless of its affiliation with OpenAI — has been spared the misrepresentation of its content on ChatGPT.”