Last week, five of Canada’s most prominent news media outlets launched a lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement, demanding what could amount to billions in damages. The suit follows similar cases brought earlier this year against the creator of ChatGPT by The New York Times and other media companies in the United States.

At the heart of all these lawsuits is the claim that OpenAI “scraped” large amounts of content from media sites. This involved copying without permission. And the company is making a profit from it without compensating the original creators.

OpenAI has yet to formally respond to the Canadian lawsuit, but insists that using news material to train its chatbot is “fair dealing” under copyright law — and not an infringement.

Who is right? And why is OpenAI entering licensing agreements with various media companies if they’re so sure they’re not breaking the law?

Is the Canadian case just a ploy to land a big licensing deal?

A closer look at how chatbots are trained suggests that OpenAI may be right that “scraping” isn’t copying. But it may not be “fair dealing” either.

To be clear, the five media companies — Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail Inc., The Canadian Press and........

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