(Bloomberg) — Five Canadian news media publishers have acquired OpenAI Inc. sued for violating copyright by scraping content to train artificial intelligence products like ChatGPT – opening a new front against the $157 billion startup.
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Torstar Corp., Postmedia Network Canada Corp., Globe and Mail Inc., the Canadian Press and CBC/Radio-Canada filed the action Thursday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, seeking damages to be determined at trial.
“OpenAI capitalizes and profits from the use of this content without obtaining permission or compensating content owners,” the publishers said in a statement on Friday. Prosecutors say they are responsible for the “vast majority of Canada’s journalistic content.”
An OpenAI spokesperson said its models are trained on “publicly available data, based on fair use and related international copyright principles.” The company also said it is working with news publishers on how their content is displayed, attributed and linked to, including ways to unsubscribe.
Late last year, New York Times Co. complained. OpenAI and its partner, software giant Microsoft Corp., alleging that the companies relied on millions of its copyrighted articles to train their AI systems.
Paul Deegan, president of the trade group News Media Canada, which represents the newspaper publisher plaintiffs, said OpenAI was “stripping mining journalism while substantially, unjustly and unlawfully enriching itself.”
(Updates with ChatGPT commentary in fourth paragraph and trade group commentary in sixth paragraph.)
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