ANALYSIS: Did OpenAI Scrape Its Way Into Copyright Infringement?

In November, the Toronto Star newspaper and five other leading Canadian media companies and news outlets sued OpenAI in an Ontario court, arguing that the artificial intelligence company trained its ChatGPT models using data that was copyright protected under Canada’s Copyright Act.

Although the lawsuit is predicated on Canadian law, it joins a growing number of media company lawsuits targeting OpenAI over its practice of scraping—the process of using software to collect large swaths of public data from the internet.

It started with the New York Times, which filed suit in the Southern District of New York in December ...