As Canadian news publishers allege that OpenAI violated Canadian copyright law in training ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI) company is arguing that the case should be heard in the United States (US).
A group of Canadian news outlets filed a suit against OpenAI last November in Ontario court, claiming that the AI giant used news content without authorization to train the GPT large language models (LLMs) powering its popular chatbot. The publishers include the Toronto Star’s parent company Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, CBC/Radio-Canada, and The Canadian Press.
“OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not [fair]. It’s illegal.”
Canadian news publishers’ joint statement
OpenAI is set to challenge the Ontario Superior Court’s jurisdiction in hearing the case today, as The Canadian Press first reported. In a court filing, the San Francisco-headquartered OpenAI argued that all of its commercial activities—including training AI models—occurred outside of Ontario and should not be subject to Canada’s Copyright Act. OpenAI originally filed a notice of motion to dismiss or suspend the proceedings in February.
“The legal framework most directly implicated is U.S. copyright law,” the document reads.
AI developers like OpenAI rely on massive amounts of data, mostly taken from the open web, to train LLMs. Canadian news publishers allege that OpenAI breached Canada’s Copyright Act when it “brazenly misappropriate[d]” their news content and used it to train ChatGPT’s associated models without consent.
“OpenAI’s public statements that it is somehow fair or in the public interest for them to use other companies’ intellectual property for their own commercial gain is wrong,” the news publishers said in a joint statement. “OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not [fair]. It’s illegal.”
The group is seeking damages, profits that OpenAI has made from the alleged infringement, and an injunction to prevent future use of its content. These damages could include as much as $20,000 per allegedly infringed work, which totals over 10 million works since 2015, according to the lawsuit.
According to OpenAI’s filing, the news publishers argued that this case relates to questions of national sovereignty and the importance of journalism. OpenAI called for these “appeals to sentiment” to be rejected as “distractions.”
RELATED: Major Canadian news orgs sue OpenAI for copyright infringement
OpenAI also claimed that some of the plaintiffs’ case materials expanded the original claim to include not only unauthorized use of content for AI model training, but the outputs of the models, as well. The company contrasted this with a separate lawsuit against Canadian LLM developer Cohere, filed in New York by a different group of publishers, that alleges copyright infringement through AI model output, as well as training.
OpenAI was granted a sealing order for certain documents related to this case in July, according to court documents. The information it sought to protect from the public included descriptions of “business dealings, artificial intelligence systems, or model training and inference processes,” as well as an organizational chart.
This is not the only lawsuit OpenAI is facing that alleges copyright infringement, but it is the first of its kind in Canada. The New York Times made comparable allegations against OpenAI and its backer, Microsoft, which was combined with a separate suit by US authors.
Other AI copyright cases have recently been resolved. Anthropic struck an agreement in a suit brought by music publishers over song lyrics, and agreed to a $1.5-billion USD settlement with book authors. Toronto’s Thomson Reuters won its case against now-defunct legaltech startup Ross Intelligence in February, though the startup was granted an appeal.
Canada launched a public consultation in 2023 to explore the use of copyright-protected works in the training of AI systems, but it has not yet produced legislation. Cohere, Google, and OpenAI-backer Microsoft have previously asked the federal government for a legal exemption to the Copyright Act that would allow them to use copyrighted materials to train their models without paying or obtaining permission. Earlier this summer, AI Minister Evan Solomon said the federal government is waiting for copyright cases to play out in the courts before making final decisions.
Feature image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.