A broad coalition of Canada’s major news organizations, including the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC, is suing tech giant OpenAI, saying the company is illegally using news articles to train its ChatGPT software.
It’s the first time all of a country’s major news publishers have come together in litigation against OpenAI.
The suit, filed in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice Friday morning, seeks punitive damages, disgorgement of any profits made by OpenAI from using the news organizations’ articles, and an injunction barring OpenAI from using any of the news articles in the future.
“Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal,” said a joint statement from the media organizations, which are represented by law firm Lenczner Slaght. None of the allegations contained in the suit have been proven in court.
In a written statement, an OpenAI spokesperson defended the company’s conduct.
“Hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on ChatGPT to improve their daily lives, inspire creativity, and solve hard problems. Our models are trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation,” the spokesperson said.
But in a memo to employees sent shortly after the suit was filed, Torstar CEO Neil Oliver accused OpenAI of using published work without permission.
“We will not stand by while tech companies steal our content. While we embrace the opportunities that technological innovation can bring, all participants must follow the law, and any use of our intellectual property must be on fair terms,” Oliver wrote.
He added that the work produced by the company’s journalists is vital to democracy — and to the company’s bottom line.
“You put your names, and Torstar’s name, behind your work, taking on all of the public accountability that this entails. The journalism we produce is at the core of our business model and is essential to our democracy and the communities we serve,” Oliver wrote in the memo to staff.
The suit seeks up to $20,000 in statutory damages per article used by OpenAI, which could put the total value of the suit in the range of billions of dollars.
The suit accuses OpenAI of using articles without the news organizations’ consent to help train ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot which responds to prompts and questions from users.
“To obtain the significant quantities of text data needed to develop their GPT models, OpenAI deliberately ‘scrapes’ (i.e. accesses and copies) content from the news media companies’ websites … It then uses that proprietary content to develop its GPT models, without consent or authorization,” the suit alleges.
The fact that OpenAI has signed licensing agreements with other media organizations to pay for content is a sign the company knows it’s in the wrong, argued Lenczner Slaght partner Sana Halwani in an interview with the Star.
Halwani, who’s leading the legal case for the news organizations, said OpenAI’s use of the articles might be different than copyright infringement from another era, but that doesn’t make it right.
“The uses (to) which they are putting those copies is something new and different, because it’s this new technology, but copying is copying,” argued Halwani, who said OpenAI’s “scraping” of the articles violates the terms and conditions of each publisher’s website.
The argument of fair use — known as “fair dealing” under Canadian copyright law — doesn’t hold water here, she added.
“Let’s remember that this is a commercial entity making money from the content that they’re taking … That’s not an allowable purpose under the fair dealing exception,” Halwani said.
Independent technology analyst and writer Carmi Levy said the entire artificial intelligence industry has plenty at stake.
“You cannot have a ChatGPT unless you turn the technological equivalent of a vacuum cleaner loose on the open internet. The Large Language Model cannot exist unless a massive amount of data is ingested,” he said.
The suit follows similar litigation from news organizations around the world seeking compensation from OpenAI for the use of published work in training ChatGPT, one of the most popular consumer software applications ever produced.
OpenAI has already signed licensing agreements with some media organizations. Last July, it signed a licensing agreement with U.S.-based news service The Associated Press.
It has also reached agreements with NewsCorp and Condé Nast.
A suit by the New York Times against OpenAI and partner Microsoft is also underway, with lawyers for the newspaper accusing OpenAI’s engineers of erasing evidence the newspaper’s lawyers had gathered for use in the trial.
OpenAI has also faced litigation from co-founder Elon Musk.
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI was valued at $157 billion (U.S.) after its latest round of fundraising from investors.