Lawsuit tracker
Canadian News Media v. OpenAI
Canadian News Media Companies v. OpenAI (Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Toronto)
| Plaintiffs | CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, Torstar and The Canadian Press |
|---|---|
| Defendants | OpenAI entities |
| Court | Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Canada |
| Filed | 2024-11-29 |
| Status | Active |
| Content type | journalism |
| Last updated | 2026-07-21 |
The claims
Copyright infringement under Canada’s Copyright Act and breach of website terms of use over the scraping and use of Canadian news content for training. The publishers seek damages — statutory damages can reach C$20,000 per work — plus disgorgement of profits and an injunction.
What has happened
Canada’s major news organizations filed the country’s first AI training copyright case, jointly alleging OpenAI scraped large volumes of their journalism to build ChatGPT and profits from it without permission or payment. OpenAI responded with a jurisdictional challenge: it argued it has no presence in Ontario, that the crawling and training happened outside Canada, and that any fight belongs in U.S. courts. The Ontario Superior Court of Justice heard the challenge in September 2025 and dismissed it in November 2025, reasoning that the fair and efficient working of the Canadian legal system favours letting Canadian creators pursue claims over Canadian-created works against foreign companies at home. The case now proceeds in Ontario.
Key developments
- 2024-11-29 — CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, Torstar and The Canadian Press file jointly in Toronto — the first Canadian case of its kind.
- 2025-09 — OpenAI argues its jurisdictional challenge, saying the alleged conduct took place outside Ontario and the dispute should be heard in the United States.
- 2025-11-27 — The Ontario Superior Court of Justice dismisses the challenge; the lawsuit will proceed in Ontario.
Why it matters for training data
Training abroad does not keep a model company out of local court where the content and the harm sit. Canada has no US-style fair use — fair dealing is narrower — so a merits loss here could bite harder than an equivalent loss in the S.D.N.Y. Multinational deployers should map copyright exposure country by country, not by server location.
Sources
- CBC: media outlets sue ChatGPT creator (Nov. 2024)
- National Observer: OpenAI says suit belongs in US courts
- BNN Bloomberg: lawsuit to go ahead in Ontario
- CBC: lawsuit gets green light to proceed in Ontario
Deeper analysis
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