Toronto Star Newspapers Limited v. OpenAI Inc., 2025 ONSC 6217
2025-11-07
Read full decision. Summary prepared by Alan Macek:
The U.S.-based defendants (“OpenAI Entities”) are located and were served with the Statement of Claim outside of Ontario. They ask the court to set aside service of the Statement of Claim under r. 17.06 of the Rules of Civil Procedure, and to stay or dismiss this proceeding against them, under s. 106 of the Courts of Justice Act. ... These claims arise from the crawling and scraping of web content and data, the training of AI large language models (“LLMs”) that power ChatGPT using that data (including the plaintiffs’ copyrighted content), and the reproduction and use of that copyrighted content for the defendants’ commercial purposes. ... In other words, territorial jurisdiction such as the defendants assert in respect of the Copyright Act claims is a question about whether there is a real and substantial connection, which is embedded in the in personam jurisdiction (jurisdiction simpliciter), Van Breda analysis. It is not a threshold subject matter jurisdiction question as the defendants contend. ... To the extent that the infringing conduct includes the use of copyrighted material that is sent (transmitted) from or through Canada (through scraping or training) or sending copyrighted material back into Canada (through either reproduction of copyrighted material or if the model itself constitutes a breach through its unauthorized reproduction of the copyrighted content), then Ontario does have a real and substantial connection to the alleged breaches of the Copyright Act.