By techycrunchy 
A group of major Canadian news and media companies, including the Toronto Star, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and The Globe and Mail, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright infringement. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI used content scraped from their websites to train the models behind ChatGPT without permission, leading to unjust enrichment at the expense of the news organizations.
The Allegations
The companies argue that the content they produce—journalistic work created by reporters, editors, and staff—has been misappropriated by OpenAI for commercial purposes without consent or compensation. They contend that rather than seeking legal permission, OpenAI has used this material for its large language models to generate responses in ChatGPT, which has been used by millions of people worldwide. The media companies are seeking monetary damages and are asking the court to prevent OpenAI from further using their content.
The Broader Legal Context
OpenAI is already facing similar lawsuits from The New York Times, New York Daily News, YouTube creators, and authors like Sarah Silverman. These lawsuits stem from concerns that OpenAI’s scraping of content from the web, often without explicit permission from content creators, violates copyright law.
Despite these legal challenges, OpenAI has signed licensing agreements with several major publishers, including The Associated Press, Axel Springer, and Le Monde. However, the plaintiffs in this case claim that they have never received any form of compensation for the use of their content by OpenAI.
OpenAI’s Defense
In response to the lawsuit, an OpenAI spokesperson stated that ChatGPT is used by millions of people globally to enhance their creativity and problem-solving skills. The company also asserted that its models are trained on publicly available data, which they believe falls under fair use principles. According to OpenAI, this approach is in line with international copyright laws and supports innovation while respecting the rights of creators.
This legal battle underscores the ongoing tensions between AI companies and content creators over the use of copyrighted materials to train generative AI models, a topic that continues to evolve as more lawsuits and licensing deals emerge.