In September, OpenAI lawyers argued in an Ontario court that Canadian judges have no jurisdiction over a lawsuit by leading media companies claiming the tech company uses their copyrighted material to generate AI search answers. 

OpenAI’s lawyers argued that if copyrighted material was used, it happened in the U.S. and any lawsuit should be filed there.

In their court filing, the plaintiffs — including The Toronto Star, The Canadian Press and the CBC — argue that OpenAI has been scraping their content since 2015, that the “content resides in Canada,” and that the company’s Ontario operations bring it under the court’s jurisdiction

The Canadian lawsuit is just one example of media companies scrambling to protect what’s left of their business models from the encroachment of tech companies.

News executives are warning that AI poses a threat to the industry by reducing the traffic they received from news-related searches. Google’s AI Overviews, for example, typically contains no credit or links to the original content creator in its summary answers to searches.

“Without discovery [via search] and copyright, there is no viable business model for our craft,” David Skok, publisher of The Logic news site, said in a July column. 

He pointed to a report from Similarweb that showed traffic to news sites via search has fallen 26 per cent from mid-2024 to May 2025.

Publishers in the United States, Europe and the U.K. have launched lawsuits and lobbied regulators to protect intellectual property and preserve their place in the search-engine ecosystem.

Governments are keen to capitalize on the innovations offered by artificial intelligence and large language models. 

There will be winners and losers, as with any innovation. 

But we must ensure the advance of AI does not comes at the cost of the content creators whose work the tech companies use to inform their models. 

WPFC’s “AI and the press” symposium in November will be seized with these challenges.