OpenAI wants lawsuit by Canadian news outlets moved from Ontario to U.S.
Global News
OpenAI is set to argue that a lawsuit by several Canadian news publishers should be moved from an Ontario court to the United States.
OpenAI is set to argue in an Ontario court today that a copyright lawsuit filed by Canadian news publishers involving its ChatGPT generative AI system should be heard in a U.S. courtroom instead.
A coalition of Canadian news outlets which includes The Canadian Press, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, Postmedia and CBC/Radio-Canada is suing OpenAI for using news content to train ChatGPT.
In what is the first case of its kind in Canada, they argue OpenAI is breaching copyright by scraping large amounts of content from Canadian media, and then profiting from the use of that content without permission or compensation.
OpenAI is challenging the jurisdiction of the Ontario Superior Court to hear the case, arguing the company isn’t located in Ontario and doesn’t do business in the province. It’s headquartered in San Francisco and the court documents note all of the companies’ subsidiaries were “incorporated or formed under the laws of Delaware.”
OpenAI says in a court filing that “the alleged conduct — namely, the training of AI models and the automated crawling of web content — occurred entirely outside Ontario.”
OpenAI is arguing the Copyright Act doesn’t apply to activities that occurred outside Canada and the case should be heard in the United States.
“Canadian copyright law does not apply to extraterritorial conduct,” it says in its submission. “The fact that the Plaintiffs are located in Canada or that some of their websites are hosted on servers in Canada is immaterial to the extraterritorial conduct alleged.”
In their filing, the news publishers say the case should proceed in Ontario. They argue there is a “real and substantial connection to Ontario” and that they deliver the “vast majority” of journalistic content in Ontario and Canada.
