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. In June, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the…
Author: Robert Diab, Professor, Faculty of Law, Thompson Rivers University
On Nov. 6, the Canadian government did something unexpected: it ordered the owners of the social media app TikTok to wind up their operations in Canada — without banning the app itself. The reason had to do with national security concerns that were not disclosed. Many are wondering what kind of threat TikTok poses by having offices in Toronto and Vancouver, or how shutting them down would make Canada safer. One legal expert has suggested that ordering TikTok to leave Canada without banning the app “may actually make matters worse” because it would make it harder to enforce Canadian law…
When Apple’s version of AI, branded as Apple Intelligence, rolls out in October to folks with the company’s latest hardware, the response is likely to be a mix of delight and disappointment. The AI capabilities on their way to Apple’s walled-garden will bring helpful new features, such as textual summaries in email, Messages and Safari; image creation; and a more context-aware version of Siri. But as Apple Intelligence’s beta testing has already made clear, the power of these features falls well below what is on offer from major players like OpenAI, Google and Meta. Apple AI won’t come close to…