Canadian publishers sue OpenAI over copyright

Allege that OpenAI regularly breaches copyright by scraping large amounts of content from Canadian media

A coalition of Canadian news publishers, including The Canadian Press, Torstar, Globe and Mail, Postmedia and CBC/Radio-Canada, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for using news content to train its ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence system.

The outlets said in a joint statement on Friday that OpenAI regularly breaches copyright by scraping large amounts of content from Canadian media.

"OpenAI is capitalising and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners," the statement said. The publishers argue that OpenAI practices undermine the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in journalism, and that content is protected by copyright.