OpenAI is facing a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit from Canadian news sites

OpenAI is on-track to revolutionize the AI industry, but not without facing some opposition. The ChatGPT maker is fending off several copyright lawsuits at the moment. These include lawsuits from companies like The New York Times. Well, according to a new report, news sites in Canada are also suing OpenAI.

It’s the same old argument; publications do NOT like knowing that AI companies are stealing their content to train AI models. This goes double for publications that offer their content to the public at a price. Thanks to some recent reports, we found out that companies like OpenAI used much more data from premium sites (sites that paywall their content) than we thought. In fact, thanks to the report, we know that they preferred to use premium data, which only makes the situation worse.

Several new sites in Canada are suing OpenAI

It looks like OpenAI has another lawsuit to throw on the fire. According to the report, Canadian news outlets like Toronto Star, National Post, The Canadian press, The Globe and Mail, and CBC/Radio-Canada are suing OpenAI. They’re suing it for much the same reason as the other companies.

OpenAI scraped data from their websites without permission. Postmedia, the company that owns National Post, stated that “OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of [our] content, without getting permission or compensating content owners. ” This is something that other companies accuse OpenAI of doing. Well, this goes for the publications that haven’t struck deals with OpenAI.

Several other companies, like Vox Media, Dotdash Meredith, Axel Springer, News Corp, and several others have sold out and struck deals with OpenAI. This means that they hand their data over to the company to use.

The Canadian companies want a massive sum of money

According to the lawsuit, the group of Canadian publications demand $20,000 Canadian for each article scraped. We don’t know exactly how many articles OpenAI scraped, but $20K per article can add up. All in all, that stacks up to a couple billion dollars.

We’re sure that OpenAI can take a financial hit like that, but it’s not exactly Google or Microsoft. Losing a few billion dollars might affect its future plans and subsequent releases.

Fair use?

Postmedia’s statement talked about how OpenAI claims that its practices fall under fair use. However, we’re all still figuring out what that means when it comes to AI. AI companies argue that scraping a company’s website is legal, as their chatbots don’t reproduce their content verbatim. However, some researchers have found that certain chatbots reproduce entire sections of scraped articles.

What makes this worse is the fact that many of the companies having their data scraped offer their articles for a price. These are publications that paywall their articles and use that as a revenue source. If a chatbot could scrape content from one of those sites and reproduce its content for free, then that could warrant a lawsuit.

Right now, this lawsuit is just getting underway, so it could be months before we see any sort of results. We’re still waiting for some word about the New York Times vs. OpenAI lawsuit, and that started at the beginning of the year.