A copyright lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI by a coalition of Canadian news media companies can proceed in Ontario, a judge ruled Friday.
The decision rejects OpenAI’s assertion that the case, which alleges the tech giant illegally used news articles to train its generative AI software and is now profiting unjustly, should be heard in the U.S. and therefore dismissed as out of jurisdiction.
The lawsuit, the first of its kind in Canada, was filed last December by a broad group of major Canadian news organizations, including the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC.
OpenAI, which is headquartered in San Francisco, argued that the alleged webcrawling of news content and training of the ChatGPT large language model, also known as a LLM, occurred outside Ontario.
However, Superior Court of Ontario Justice Jessica Kimmel concluded the case against OpenAI is “sufficiently connected to Ontario” with three OpenAI-affiliated companies named in the lawsuit — OpenAI OpCo, LLC, OpenAI, LLC, and OpenAI, Inc. — being identified as doing business in the province.
“On the whole, the fair and efficient working of the legal system in Canada favours allowing Canadian authors of Canadian-created Works with claims against foreign companies for breaches of Canadian copyright and other laws to pursue those claims here,” Kimmel wrote.
Kimmel awarded costs to the Canadian media consortium, represented by the law firm Lenczner Slaght.
The allegations in the lawsuit have not been proven in court.
Similar copyright infringement lawsuits are ongoing against OpenAI in the U.S., including one filed by the New York Times in 2023.
“ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives. Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in the principles of fair use,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement to the Star.
