A group of news organizations, including major Canadian newspapers, has taken legal action against Anthropic, an AI company, in an Ontario court. The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic violated copyright laws by using content from the publishers to develop its large language AI model named Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has profited from its AI models and services without obtaining proper licenses from the news media companies, leading to unfair enrichment at the expense of the publishers. The lawsuit, filed on October 6 and first reported by Cartt.ca, highlights the breach of terms of service on the news websites and the circumvention of technological protection measures put in place by the publishers.
The claim asserts that the news outlets are significant contributors to Canada’s journalistic content, catering to millions of readers through print and digital news coverage. It accuses Anthropic of scraping vast amounts of text data from the internet and the publishers’ websites without authorization to fuel its AI models. The news organizations claim that Anthropic continues to scrape content ongoingly, even in response to user prompts.
Despite concerns raised by various content creators and legal actions in different industries, including the ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, Anthropic allegedly persists in its unauthorized practices. Similar legal battles have been seen globally, with news publishers like The New York Times also taking legal action against tech companies for using their content to train AI systems.
The Canadian news organizations are not alone in their fight against copyright infringement by AI companies, as demonstrated by the legal actions taken by various publishers worldwide.
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