Canadian news outlets are suing OpenAI for copyright violations

A joint copyright lawsuit by Canadian news outlets has accused OpenAI of illegally using their articles to train their AI model. 

CBC reports that the group of news outlets, including CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, Metroland, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the Canadian Press, have filed the lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and are looking for "punitive damages" and "payment of any profits that the company made from using news articles from the organizations."

This is the latest in a long list of lawsuits by news outlets against OpenAI that allege the company has been scraping their data to train its chatbots. OpenAI is already battling The New York Times, Center for Investigative Journalism, Chicago Tribune, ANI, and many more. 

Speaking with The Verge, Jason Deutrom, spokesperson for OpenAI, said the company collaborates "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."

In a joint statement, the Canadian news outlets said OpenAI was "capitalizing and profiting" by using their content "without getting permission or compensating content owners."

In an emailed statement to CBC, Deutrom said OpenAI's models were trained on publicly available data, and the company was "grounded" in "international copyright principles."