Many of Canada’s largest news organizations have sued ChatGPT’s OpenAI firm, accusing it of violating copyright laws and using their content for commercial gain. Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, CBC/Radio-CanadaTorstar and Postmedia have co-signed the lawsuit filed on November 29.
Chatbots are trained using large amounts of publicly available data collected online, with newspapers being a common source of this training data, a process known as “data scraping”.
The document claims that: “OpenAI has taken large portions of the work at face value, indiscriminately and without regard to copyright protection or contractual Terms of Use applicable to the appropriated content.”
The lawsuit goes on to allege that OpenAI “was aware of the value” of the company’s intellectual property and “the need to pay for that information and provide express authorization” throughout the data collection process.
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The lawsuit also points to the significant financial success of OpenAI—which has reached a $157 billion valuation—saying it was “substantially and unjustly enriched” at their expense.
The group of news companies is seeking damages for the illegal misuse of their content, as well as “permanent injunctive relief” to stop OpenAI from “continuing its illegal conduct.”
The Canadian publishing group has a lot of company when it comes to taking legal action against OpenAI. They join many of the world’s biggest newspapers such as New York Times AND The Wall Street Journal publisher News Corp, all of whom have filed similar lawsuits against AI firms.
However, the latest lawsuit comes as New York Times the lawsuit against OpenAI, which was first filed in October 2023, still has no clear end in sight. Recently, OpenAI’s defense argued that NYT lawyers were using examples of “unrealistic claims” in their case against them.
And it’s not just OpenAI that has media organizations looking for their cut.
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Dow Jones & Company and NYP Holdings, which own The Wall Street Journal AND New York Postrespectively, filed a combined lawsuit against OpenAI competitor Perplexity AI on similar grounds in October. The New York Times sent Perplexity a cease and desist letter earlier this month.
Lawsuits about where ChatGPT gets its training data aren’t the only thing OpenAI has to worry about. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk filed a lawsuit in March alleging that OpenAI has abused its charitable status and gone from a “tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion profit-making, market-crippling gorgon — and in just eight years”.
OpenAI has managed to successfully avoid some of the legal attacks that come its way. Earlier this month, a judge dismissed a copyright case against OpenAI brought by independent publishers Alternet and Raw Story, with the judge ruling that they were unable to provide adequate evidence that ChatGPT was trained to their material.
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