A coalition of Canadian news organizations—including The Canadian Press, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, Postmedia, and CBC/Radio-Canada—have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI has infringed upon their copyrights by scraping extensive content from their publications without authorization to train its AI models.
The media companies contend that OpenAI has systematically extracted substantial amounts of their content to develop products like ChatGPT, without obtaining permission or providing compensation. They assert that this practice undermines their significant investments in journalism and violates copyright laws.
In their joint statement, the media organizations emphasized: “OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners. Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal.”
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The lawsuit seeks $20,000 (approximately $14,700 USD) for each instance of allegedly infringed content. Given the scope of the claims, damages could reach billions of dollars. Beyond monetary compensation, the plaintiffs demand a share of OpenAI’s profits and an injunction to prevent the unauthorized use of their content in future AI training processes.
The Canadian media coalition claims that OpenAI actively circumvented technological and legal protections designed to prevent unauthorized content use. These include paywalls, copyright notices and robot exclusion protocols signaling automated systems not to scrape data.
The plaintiffs allege OpenAI bypassed these safeguards intentionally, violating established copyright norms and ethical boundaries.
OpenAI maintains that its AI models are trained on publicly available data and that such use aligns with fair use and related international copyright principles. A spokesperson for OpenAI stated, “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.”
This lawsuit is the first of its kind in Canada but follows a series of similar legal actions in the United States. Notably, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging unauthorized use of its content to train AI systems. Additionally, authors such as Sarah Silverman have initiated legal proceedings against AI companies for similar reasons.
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