Canadian media companies launch legal action against OpenAI

The complainants include Torstar, The Canadian Press, The Globe and Mail, CBC/Radio-Canada and Postmedia Network Inc.

Canada’s leading media organizations have launched a legal action against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI Inc., arguing that the California-based company regularly breached copyright and online terms of use by using “large swaths” of their content to develop its products without permission or compensation.

The complainants include Torstar, The Canadian Press, The Globe and Mail, CBC/Radio-Canada and Postmedia Network Inc, which publishes the Financial Post.

“News media companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars into reporting Canadians’ critical stories,” Postmedia said in a statement posted on its website. “OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners.”

While media companies welcome technological innovations, participants must follow the law, it added.

OpenAI wasn’t immediately available for a response.

The company is facing a similar action in the United States. In April, a group of eight newspapers alleged that technology companies, including OpenAI, were using news articles without payment or permission to train their chatbots. This was after the New York Times filed a similar lawsuit in December.

In response to the lawsuit filed by the New York Times, OpenAI said in a statement in January that training AI models using publicly available internet materials was “fair use” and that the approach is “supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents.”

It added that the company provides a “simple opt out process” for publishers to prevent the company’s tools from accessing their sites.

The tech company has made a number of deals with media companies such as the Financial Times, Time, The Atlantic, News Corp. and Hearst to license content for the purpose of training its AI models.

• Email: nkarim@postmedia.com

Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don’t miss the business news you need to know — add financialpost.com to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters here.