Partial Sealing Order Issued In Infringement Claim By Media Against OpenAI

On August 14, 2025, the Superior Court of Justice issued its decision in Toronto Star Newspapers Limited v OpenAI Inc., 2025 ONSC 4685, granting OpenAI and its related entities’ (collectively, the Defendants) request for a Partial Sealing Order (the Order) in its motion to challenge the court’s jurisdiction over certain claims. In the underlying action, the Defendants are being sued by several Canadian newspaper and media outlets (collectively, the Plaintiffs) for copyright infringement, breach of their “Terms of Use”, and circumvention of technological protection measures.

The Order governs what designated confidential information relied upon in the jurisdiction motion will be sealed from the public court record. OpenAI’s identified confidential information is comprised of affidavits relating to:

• the corporate organization and structure of certain Defendant entities;
• web crawling and fetching processes, systems, resource allocations, and updates/modifications/improvements; and
• model training and inference processes, systems, resource allocations, and/or cost structures.

The Defendants stated that this information is neither public knowledge nor in the public domain.

The Court held that competitors could gain an unearned advantage to the detriment of the Defendants through public disclosure of this information.

Obtaining a Partial Sealing Order requires the requesting party to show that:

• court openness poses a serious risk to an important matter of public interest;
• the order sought is necessary to prevent this serious risk because reasonably alternative measures will not suffice; and,
• as a matter of proportionality, the benefits of the order outweigh its negative effects.

The Court determined that encouraging fair competition in a free and open market is an important matter of public interest, with heightened concerns arising when a party has not chosen to litigate but is instead defending themselves. The Court also found that the Defendants narrowly identified the confidential and commercially sensitive business information, which sufficiently restricted the potential scope of the Order as much as reasonably possible. Lastly, the Court held that the Order represented a minimal intrusion on the open court rule, and any deleterious effects were outweighed by the salutary effects.

Summary By: Amy Ariganello