A coalition of major Canadian news organisations has launched a landmark legal action against OpenAI, alleging systematic copyright breaches in the training of its ChatGPT artificial intelligence system.

Five prominent Canadian media companies, including the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), filed an 84-page lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Friday, seeking potentially billions of dollars in damages.

The news organisations claim OpenAI has systematically scraped their content without permission or compensation. "OpenAI regularly breaches copyright and online terms of use by scraping large swathes of content from Canadian media to help develop its products, such as ChatGPT," the companies stated in a joint statement.

The lawsuit demands C$20,000 per article allegedly used illegally, along with a share of profits and an injunction preventing future unauthorised use of their content. Paul Deegan, president of News Media Canada, characterised the action as fighting against companies that are "strip-mining journalism" and "free-riding on the backs of news publishers who invest real money to employ real journalists who produce real stories for real people".

OpenAI has defended its practices, with a spokesperson stating that its models are "trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation".

This legal challenge mirrors similar actions in the United States, including a lawsuit by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft. The Canadian case focuses specifically on the training of AI models and does not include Microsoft as a defendant.

The lawsuit comes amid growing tension between media organisations and artificial intelligence companies over the use of copyrighted content. OpenAI, recently valued at C$157 billion, has already established licensing agreements with some media organisations, including the Associated Press and NewsCorp.

Sana Halwani, a partner at the law firm representing the media organisations, emphasised the core of their legal challenge: "We believe we have a strong case related to the training of the models. The training of the models is the core of the problem."

None of the claims have been tested in court, but the lawsuit represents a significant escalation in the ongoing debate about intellectual property rights in the age of artificial intelligence.

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