Five of Canada’s biggest news organizations are suing OpenAI for billions of dollars, claiming the ChatGPT developer illegally used their content to train its AI algorithms. “OpenAI has taken large swaths of valuable work, indiscriminately and without regard for copyright protection or the contractual Terms of Use applicable to the misappropriated content,” reads the suit.

Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and the CBC filed suit in Ontario Superior Court on Friday. It’s the first time Canadian media organizations have gone after OpenAI for the company’s practice of “scraping” data from websites to use as fodder for ChatGPT, the company’s wildly successful AI chatbot. Postmedia is an investor in The Logic.

The media organizations are seeking damages and part of any profits made from copyrighted content they own in an “amount to be determined at trial.” Failing that, the media organizations said the court could order OpenAI to pay $20,000, or “an amount the court considers just,” per work “scraped” from their respective platforms without consent. Collectively, the organizations say they’ve published 16.1 million owned and licensed pieces of content since 2015, meaning a theoretical $322-billion payout for the news organizations. OpenAI is currently valued at US$157 billion ($220 billion).

The suit follows several U.S. lawsuits from media companies and individuals, including The New York Times, which claimed ChatGPT and Microsoft chatbots “usurp specific commercial opportunities” of the newspaper and should be held liable for “billions of dollars” in damages. “As an advocate for authors and artists, I’m glad to see the growing global consensus that the unfairness of current AI training practices must be addressed,” Matthew Butterick, a lawyer who has sued several generative AI companies on behalf of artists and writers, told The Logic. 

In the past, OpenAI has denied the copyright infringement claims, saying accessing publicly available content was fair game. OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the Canadian litigation.

The news organizations are in for a “very technical and labour-intensive battle” because of the sheer amount of data involved, according Christelle Tessono, a technology policy researcher at Toronto Metropolitan University’s think tank the Dais. “Will the Canadian newspapers’ lawyers have the capacity and expertise to analyze data? Will a Canadian court even be able to require OpenAI to share their training data like in the U.S.?” said Tessono. 

Similar cases in the U.S. have made slow progress. The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, filed in December 2023, recently took an intriguing turn when the publisher alleged that OpenAI’s engineers had inadvertently erased data the paper had spent more than 150 hours extracting as potential evidence.