Media companies’ lawsuit against OpenAI latest in growing number of challenges to AI data scraping

Canadian Lawyer spoke to Sana Halwani about the recently launched legal action on the Commercial List by Canada's leading news media companies against OpenAI, the first of its kind in Canada.

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No Canadian court has determined whether scraping on this scale is acceptable or whether the companies engaged in the scraping have a legitimate defence, notes Sana Halwani, a partner at Lenczner Slaght and one of the lawyers representing the media organizations in last week’s lawsuit against OpenAI.

“We are in precedent-setting territory with this case,” Halwani says, adding that she anticipates seeing more claims with similar allegations.

In the US, “we've seen a number of lawsuits that have been launched in the last couple of years against OpenAI and other AI companies,” she says. “If the US is the leading edge sometimes on these things, then I would expect that we would start seeing more and more in Canada.”