🚨 BREAKING: Various 🇨🇦 Canadian News Media Companies sue Open AI over copyright infringement, highlighting circumvention of tech protections & breach of the Terms of Use. Will they be successful? Read this: ╰┈➤ The news media companies are legally claiming for a declaration that the OpenAI is liable for: 1️⃣ "Infringing, authorizing, and/or inducing the infringement of the News Media Companies’ copyright in the Owned Works (defined below), contrary to sections 3 and 27 of the Copyright Act, RSC 1985, c C-42 (“Copyright Act”); 2️⃣ Engaging in prohibited circumvention of technological protection measures that prescribed access to, and restricted copying of, the News Media Companies’ Works (defined below), contrary to, and within the meaning of, section 41 and 41.1 of the Copyright Act; 3️⃣ Breaching the Terms of Use (defined below) of the News Media Companies’ Websites (defined below); and 4️⃣ Unjustly enriching themselves at the expense of the News Media Companies." ╰┈➤ The media companies argue they employed technological protection on their websites, including exclusion protocols (e.g., robots.txt) and account and subscription-based restrictions. However, when OpenAI scraped their content for its for-profit activities, it circumvented the protective measures deployed. ╰┈➤ Regarding the infringement of the Terms of Use, they argue: "(...) each of the Terms of Use expressly prohibit the use of the News Media Companies’ Websites and Works for any use other than personal, non-commercial uses. The Terms of Use also generally prohibit users from reproducing, distributing, broadcasting, making derivative works from, retransmitting, distributing, publishing, communicating, or otherwise making available any of the Works. Any uses not expressly permitted by the Terms of Use require the News Media Companies’ express consent—particularly commercial uses. Since as early as 2015, OpenAI has breached and continues to breach the applicable Terms of Use for each of the Websites in various ways, including by accessing, scraping, and/or copying the Works for use as part of the Training Data to train its GPT models and/or as part of the RAG Data to augment its for-profit commercial products and services." ╰┈➤ The Terms of Use breach argument, coupled with the infringement of the technological protective measures claim, might prove to be a successful legal ground for the news media companies to be successful in this lawsuit. Why? Because it diverges the focus of the dispute from potential fair use-based defenses or endless discussions about the technicalities of the LLM training process. ╰┈➤ Two days ago, I posted about the Canadian Legal Information Institute lawsuit against Caseway AI, so it looks like the AI copyright lawsuits are starting to catch up in Canada, too. 👉 Read the lawsuit below. 👉 Never miss my AI updates: join 40,800+ people who subscribe to my newsletter (below).

🚨AI copyright lawsuits have arrived in 🇨🇦CANADA! The Canadian Legal Information Institute sued Caseway AI over copyright infringement. Pay attention to the creepy practice & why the AI company will probably lose: ╰┈➤ Quick summary of the lawsuit: "1️⃣ The plaintiff, the Canadian Legal Information Institute (“CanLII”), is a not-for-profit organization that owns and operates a proprietary search engine and database containing its work product, including court decisions, legislation and secondary sources that have been reviewed, curated, catalogued and enhanced by CanLII at significant cost and effort (the “CanLII Works”) 2️⃣ In keeping with its mandate, CanLII provides the public with free access to the CanLII Works on certain terms and conditions. 3️⃣ The Defendants, and each of them, have created a business by wrongfully taking for themselves the CanLII Works by way of a bulk and systematic download from the CanLII website without permission from or compensation to CanLII. 4️⃣ In doing so, the Defendants, and each of them, have engaged in the blatant and willful breach of CanLII’s terms of use and have otherwise infringed CanLII’s copyright in the CanLII Works. 5️⃣ CanLII seeks, among other things, injunctive relief, damages and disgorgement of the Defendants’ profits resulting from the Defendants’ wrongful taking and misappropriation of the CanLII Works, including copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-42." ⛔ Pay attention to this part: "(...) at a time unknown to CanLII, but known by the Defendants, one or more of the Defendants or their agents accessed the CanLII Website and coordinated the bulk and systematic download and scraping of the CanLII Works from the CanLII Website (...). On or about- October 3, 2024, CanLII was alerted that the Copied Works were placed in an open elastic cluster located on a host with the IP address (...) which was the same host used by the Defendants, or some of them, to develop and host the Caseway Platform. Although a full investigation of the incident is ongoing, to CanLII’s knowledge to date, the Copied Works include over 120 gigabytes of data and 3.5 million records." ╰┈➤ In my opinion, especially given the bad faith of the AI company and the explicit Terms of Use infringement, the Canadian Legal Information Institute will be successful in this lawsuit. 👉 Read the lawsuit below (important additional details!). 👉 Never miss my AI updates: join 40,300+ people who subscribe to my newsletter (below).