Ottawa weighs plans on AI, copyright as OpenAI fights Ontario court
Canada’s artificial intelligence minister is keeping a close watch on court cases in Canada and the U.S. to determine next steps for Ottawa’s regulatory approach to AI.
Some AI companies have claimed early wins south of the border, and OpenAI is now fighting the jurisdiction of an Ontario court to hear a lawsuit by news publishers.
Evan Solomon’s office said in a statement he plans to address copyright “within Canada’s broader AI regulatory approach, with a focus on protecting cultural sovereignty and how [creators] factor into this conversation.”
But there are no current plans for a standalone copyright bill, as Solomon’s office is “closely monitoring the ongoing court cases and market developments” to help chart the path forward.
It’s unclear how long it will take for those court cases to determine whether artificial intelligence companies can use copyrighted content to train their AI products.
CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, Metroland, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press have launched a joint lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI, for using news content to train its ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence system. The news organizations say OpenAI breaches copyright by ‘scraping content’ from their websites.
The sole Canadian case to pose the question was launched late last year by a coalition of news publishers and the Ontario Superior Court is set to hear a jurisdictional challenge in September.
The coalition — which includes The Canadian Press, Torstar, the Globe and Mail, Postmedia and CBC/Radio-Canada — is suing OpenAI for using news content to train its generative artificial intelligence system.
The news publishers 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.
They said in court filings that OpenAI has “engaged in ongoing, deliberate and unauthorized misappropriation of [their] valuable news media works.”
“Rather than seek to obtain the information legally, OpenAI has elected to brazenly misappropriate the News Media Companies’ valuable intellectual property and convert it for its own uses, including commercial uses, without consent or consideration.”
OpenAI challenging jurisdiction
OpenAI has denied the allegations, and previously said its models are trained on publicly available data, and “grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles.”
The company, which is headquartered in San Francisco, is challenging the jurisdiction of the Ontario court to hear the case.
It argued in a court filing that it’s not located in Ontario and does not do business in the province.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft,…
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