Overview
- At an Ontario Superior Court hearing, OpenAI’s lawyer Marc Crandall said the alleged model training and web crawling occurred outside Canada and falls beyond the court’s reach.
- A coalition including The Canadian Press, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, Postmedia and CBC/Radio-Canada argues there is a real and substantial connection to Ontario based on their operations, content creation and alleged scraping through provincial servers.
- Plaintiffs’ counsel Sana Halwani and Monique Jilesen pointed to Ontario-based customers, a Microsoft partnership, and claims that OpenAI’s models are hosted in a Toronto data centre, which OpenAI disputes by saying finished models do not contain copies of training data.
- Judge Jessica Kimmel said she will issue a ruling soon on the jurisdictional motion, which does not address the underlying copyright questions.
- OpenAI says related U.S. cases on training data and fair use could create conflicts if Canadian courts proceed, while the news companies warn that accepting OpenAI’s stance would weaken Canada’s ability to regulate its digital economy.