It is no surprise that the proliferation of generative AI has led to a plethora of lawsuits. In Canada, a number of lawsuits have been filed against AI companies on many grounds. Many issues are currently being litigated including relating to ownership of intellectual property, moral rights, scraping, privacy, product liability, deepfake liability, and professional responsibility.
We have been internally keeping track of many of these cases, but to help facilitate further research and discussion, we have now published our AI Case Tracker available here.
Highlights of interesting and important ongoing cases include:
- Toronto Star et al v OpenAI (Ontario Superior Court) – Canadian publishers continue to pursue their lawsuit against OpenAI for mass scraping, bypassing of paywalls, and copyright infringement. The media companies succeeded in a jurisdiction motion and the action is proceeding this year.
- Multiple Class Actions (BC, Quebec) – a number of artists and authors have launched class action proceedings against tech companies for scraping, downloading, and use of pirated copies of copyrighted books and images to train their AI models. The majority of these cases are based on similar facts as (and, indeed, based on the evidence from) the case of Bartz v Anthropic in the US, where a class of authors sued Anthropic of using pirated books to train its LLM resulting in a settlement. Many of these Canadian proceedings are still in preliminary stages and have not yet been certified. However, it is likely at least some will proceed.
- Product Liability – If an AI agent gives you the wrong information, or worse, is the company liable for the AI chatbot’s actions? At least one case (Air Canada) has already held that the company is responsible for its AI agents’ interactions with customers. In a more tragic turn, the Tumbler Ridge shooting victims have sued OpenAI for the shooter’s alleged use of ChatGPT to discuss and plan the shooting. This lawsuit was recently commenced and remains ongoing.
Read more on our AI Case Tracker.
If you would like to let us know of any new developments, please contact us.