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Canada · CA-001

Toronto Star Newspapers Limited et al. v OpenAI Inc. et al.

HELDOntario Superior Court of Justice, Commercial ListCV-24-00732231-00CL; 2025 ONSC 4685; 2025 ONSC 6217Pending - jurisdiction and confidentiality rulings only
TrainingTraining Data AcquisitionOutputsTerritorialityTechnological Protection Measures / DMCA §1201 analogueContract overlap

Key holding or allegation

The Ontario court retained jurisdiction over six OpenAI entities while dismissing four insufficiently connected entities; the court expressly did not determine the merits of the publishers' copyright allegations.

Why it matters

Principal Canadian direct GenAI copyright litigation, with a useful jurisdiction ruling but copyright merits still open.

Facts

Canadian news organisations allege OpenAI scraped and used protected content for LLM training and reproduced/exploited it commercially.

Issues before the court

Published decisions addressed confidentiality and Ontario jurisdiction over different OpenAI entities, not copyright merits.

What the court did not decide

Whether OpenAI's alleged scraping/training infringes Canadian copyright, whether fair dealing applies, or whether outputs infringe.

Procedural timeline

2025

Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Commercial List
Confidentiality / sealing ruling: Court addressed sealing/confidentiality of evidence concerning matters including OpenAI's web crawling, training and inference processes.

HELD
2025-11-07

Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Commercial List
Jurisdiction ruling: Ontario jurisdiction retained over six OpenAI entities while four entities were dismissed for insufficient connection; court expressly did not determine publishers' copyright merits.

HELD