This article was prepared with the assistance of Rutherford Exius, Michael Kovacevic, Ashley Lam, Hailey Min and Coralee Ridder
2025 saw incremental developments in Canadian copyright matters. They are anticipated to set the foundation for potentially major changes in the coming years in AI and accessible remedies for infringement. They also highlight challenges litigants face when failing to support fundamental elements of their claims. Below are the top five trends we observed in Canadian copyright law over 2025 — and one bonus.
Table of contents
- More claims at the intersection of copyright and AI
- Courts taking practical approaches to remedies
- Don’t skip the fundamentals
- A mixed bag for novel claims and approaches to mass infringement
- Overreaching claims
1. More claims at the intersection of copyright and AI
2024 gave us a first glimpse into lawsuits brought by content creators against generative AI companies in Canada advancing copyright infringement claims for the inclusion of their works in AI training models.1 2025 saw the trend increase significantly, with no fewer than six class actions being proposed across Federal and Provincial Courts in Québec and British Columbia, to advance various copyright and moral rights infringement claims against developers of Large Language Model AI technologies.2 At least one of those actions, in Québec, has been temporarily stayed pending the outcome of a different action against the same defendant filed in British Columbia.3 Another has been granted leave to amend the application for class certification to restrict the proposed class to residents of Québec,4 with a related action before the Federal Court proposing to exclude Québec residents from the class.
In 2025, the most advanced of the cases, Toronto Star Newspapers Limited v OpenAI, Inc 24-00732231-00CL, survived the defendant’s motion to dismiss the proceeding for lack of jurisdiction over the subject matter and/or the parties to the dispute.5 In dismissing the motion, Justice Kimmel of the Ontario Superior Court affirmed the broad jurisdictional authority of the Ontario courts, and determined there was subject-matter jurisdiction over the claims (for copyright infringement, circumvention of TPMs, breach of contract or unjust enrichment), such claims were not pre-empted by anything in the Copyright Act, nor by any contractual arbitration provision that the defendants sought to rely on, and that there was a “real and substantial” connection between the defendants and Ontario, which gave rise to personal jurisdiction over the defendants, including because they carried on business in Ontario, and there was a “good arguable case” the breaches of the Copyright Act occurred in Ontario. The decision is currently under appeal.6
While not squarely related to generative AI, the Federal Court of Appeal’s decision in Doan v Clearview AI Inc, 2025 FCA 133 forecasts how some of the LLM-related class actions may proceed through the class certification process. The underlying case involves copyright and moral infringement claims related to the defendant’s scraping of images from social media to build a database for a facial recognition tool used by law enforcement. The original certification judge dismissed the motion for certification on the basis that the plaintiff’s proposal to use a query-based method to identify potential class members transformed the action into an “opt-in” scheme, which is improper.7 In remanding the certification issue, the Federal Court of Appeal identified that the parties’ submissions on appeal suggested there may be a workable solution to class identification during the opt-out period, and that the issue needed to be further canvassed by the lower court.8
2. Courts taking practical approaches to remedies
The speed at which infringers act on the internet presents numerous challenges to rights holders looking to stop bad actors in real time and penalize them when they refuse to cooperate. 2025 saw courts alive to this issue, and willing to take positive steps to facilitate “real time” enforcement. Most notably, in Bell Media Inc v John Doe 1 (Soap2day), 2025 FC 133, Justice Fothergill authorized the first “expandable” site blocking order to address “copycat” websites that pop up with infringing content after the original website is blocked. Building off the types of site-blocking orders issued by the Federal Court over the past several years, Justice Fothergill crafted one in this case that for two years permits the plaintiff to compel ISPs to block additional “copycat” sites of those in the original order by simply serving and filing an amended schedule and sworn affidavit listing the additional domains to be blocked. The ISPs then have ten days to object, and, if no objection, the Court will order the additional domains blocked.
Where parties are not cooperative or threaten to undermine the authority of the court by ignoring orders, courts in 2025 have not been afraid to impose harsh penalties for contempt to compel compliance. In Bell Media Inc v Marshall Macciacchera (Smoothstreams.tv) the Federal Court required uncooperative defendants to surrender their passports at the penalty hearing (2025 FC 461), and then later ordered incarceration of two defendants for civil contempt (2025 FC 1378): “some copyright pirates make calculated decisions to breach court orders, […]. In the face of such defiance of its orders, it behooves the Court to impose penalties designed to maximize the potential for instilling respect for its orders and the rule of law.” (early in 2026, the defendants held in contempt were also ordered to pay forthwith over $200,000 in costs related to these two motions due their “ongoing, brazen refusal to cooperate.”). Around the same time, in Mediatube Corp v Bell Canada, 2025 CanLII 116181, Mediatube and its representative were charged with contempt for repeated threats to release information and documents subject to protective and confidentiality orders.
Courts this year have also been more regularly awarding higher damages and costs where there is a need to deter conduct, for example, because of repeated infringements. For example, in Yelda Haber Ve Görsel Yayincilik A.S. v GLWiZ Inc, 2025 FC 1107, the Court awarded $5.96 million in statutory damages for unauthorized broadcasts of television content ($2,000 per episode, and $10,000 for a live channel) and later granted 30% of legal fees (a 5% upward adjustment over the 25% lower limit established in the case law) due to the defendant’s actions that delayed the proceeding several times, as well as their deliberate infringing conduct (2025 FC 1387). Similarly, in Archimed Studio Inc c Cogir, 2025 QCCQ 2673, a third time defendant was ordered to pay $15,000 in damages for unauthorized reproduction of apartment photographs relating to rental advertisements, the maximum amount possible before the Small Claims division of the Québec Superior Court. Likewise, in Dassault Systemes Solidworks Corporation c Technologies Show Canada inc, 2025 QCCS 4429, a repeat infringer was ordered to pay $412,087.39 in compensatory damages, $1,470,387 in disgorged profits and $50,000 in punitive damages.
3. Don’t skip the fundamentals
Even where infringement appears straightforward, 2025 continued the trend of courts dismissing copyright claims for basic evidentiary deficiencies — where fundamental facts like subsistence of copyright, authorship and ownership were not supported by the evidence — driving home the importance of ensuring the “best available evidence” of basic facts needed to ground standing and a claim are before the court, notwithstanding any statutory presumptions. For example, in ITP SA v CNOOC Petroleum North America ULC, 2025 FC 684, the Federal Court confirmed that the statutory presumptions about subsistence of copyright and ownership in s. 34.1 of the Copyright Act do not apply to corporations (since corporations, “capable of only metaphorical life and death”, cannot be “authors”). Consequently, the corporate plaintiff bore the full burden of proving these points before they could access the infringement claim — and they failed to meet this burden because their evidence did not establish “authorship” or “originality”. The proffered evidence was from corporate officers with no firsthand knowledge, and not the author/employee who created the work (although it was revealed the author/employee was available). The Court drew an adverse inference from absence of direct evidence from the author and found the corporate affidavits to be inadmissible hearsay.
Similarly, in Hellboy Productions, Inc v Doe #1, 2025 FC 1766 the Federal Court held the section 34.1 presumptions do not apply in the context of a motion for a Norwich order, and in that case, found a law clerk affidavit and a screenshot of film credits insufficient to establish the identity of the asserted cinematographic work’s maker, or otherwise explain the basis of ownership, so dismissed the motion. Creation and assignment of works in different contexts proved fatal to the plaintiff in McQuaig v Enbridge Gas Inc, 2025 FC 1439, where the evidence showed the plaintiff previously assigned away copyright to his corporation in the software claimed to be infringed and made later modifications to that software in the course of employment with this corporation and later, the defendant. As these assignments and relationships meant the plaintiff was not the copyright owner of any of the works asserted, the Court determined he lacked standing. At the provincial level, the threshold ownership hurdle was at issue in a motion to strike pleadings in Contino v Olymel L.P., 2025 ONSC 7064, where a corporate counterclaim for copyright infringement was struck for lack of particularity about the chain of title in the asserted work.
On the merits, conflicting representations of ownership in the plaintiff’s own evidence proved fatal to one plaintiff’s personal claim in Matsumoto v Canuck Eats Inc, 2025 FC 2017. There, evidence of website copyright notices and invoices pointed to ownership of the asserted work by a corporate entity, "Just One Cookbook". In the absence of any written assignment or grant back to Chen, or evidence that he had authority to sue on the corporation’s behalf, the Court held that he lacked standing to pursue the infringement claim.
4. A mixed bag for novel claims and approaches to mass infringement
Addressing mass infringement over the internet is challenging — the volume and speed of infringing activities, and anonymity of the infringers, makes enforcement difficult. As mentioned above, the Federal Court in Bell Media Inc v John Doe 1 (Soap2day), 2025 FC 133 this year provided rights holders with a new tool for dynamic site blocking. However, claims against masses of individual defendants seeking to proceed by way of reverse class actions continue to meet challenges. In Voltage Pictures, LLC v Salna, 2025 FCA 131, the Federal Court of Appeal agreed with the Federal Court’s ultimate dismissal of the plaintiff’s motion for certification of a reverse class of alleged infringing defendants who were alleged to have shared unauthorized copies of films through BitTorrent, though for different reasons (2023 FC 893), and varied the order to be without leave to reapply — effectively ending the litigation. In doing so, the Appellate Court held a class procedure was not the preferable procedure for addressing the infringement claims raised here because none of the common questions would advance the proceeding in any meaningful way. The mere fact that a class member was an internet subscriber whose account was used to download the works via BitTorrent is not enough to establish infringement and the remaining common questions either concerned copyright ownership, were mooted by recent related decisions, or could not arise unless and until liability was established. Relatedly, the practice of using internet service provider “notice and notice” procedures to send mass numbers of infringement notices is also facing challenges. In Bell Canada v Millennium Funding, Inc, 2025 FCA 153, the appellant, Bell Canada — a national internet service provider — had asserted the novel defence of “copyright misuse” in its pleading against the respondents who were attempting to force Bell to use its “notice and notice” procedure to send large numbers of automatically generated infringement notices to subscribers (Bell was refusing to allow its network to be used in this way). While the Federal Court struck the defence without leave to amend, on appeal, the Appellate Court found “an examination of Bell’s pleading shows that Bell raises a viable defence of copyright misuse based on allegations of using the notice and notice regime for improper purposes” and that “it is not plain and obvious that these defects [relating to sufficient particulars] cannot be cured” so granted leave to amend.
Novel claims subject to motions to strike have been granted a chance to survive through a leave to amend the pleadings in other contexts in 2025 as well. For example, in The Construction Specifications Institute, Inc v Bibliotech Inc, Order, November 26, 2025 (CMJ Moore) (FC file no. T-2423-24), the plaintiffs asserted copyright infringement in an indexing system (i.e., a method of organizing information). The Court canvassed prior decisions out of Canada and the US that considered copyright in datasets and taxonomies. While those did not provide a clear answer, the Court acknowledged that copyright could subsist in taxonomies and indexing systems if it is a way to organize information creatively (i.e., not simply alphabetically or chronologically), is not the only way to represent the idea of that organization, and the copyright of the organization is “analyzed distinctly from the copyright to the work as a whole”. (Leave to amend was granted to enable the Plaintiffs to, in part, properly articulate what was the underlying work infringed). In the Québec Courts, the defendant in Hologic Canada c Christie Innomed inc, 2025 QCCS 4127 brought a motion to dismiss and argued that changes to the Copyright Act that introduced a “right to repair” operated to effectively moot a breach of contract claim related to the defendant’s decompiling, disassembling, or reverse engineering the plaintiff’s software, which was done to access diagnostic and repair functions. Ultimately, the Court decided that this question cannot be considered at an interlocutory stage, stating that the issues raised by the parties require a full examination on hearing since there is an intersection of copyright and contract law that is not clear cut.
5. Overreaching claims
In 2025, Canadian courts released several decisions dealing with overreaching copyright claims wherein parties asserted copyright in works they did not have rights in, improperly pleaded copyright issues, and/or failed to disclose a reasonable cause of action in copyright. For example, in Gold Line Telemanagement Inc v Ereele GmbH, 2025 FC 904, the Federal Court granted a request for a declaration that the defendants, an Austrian digital marketing company and an Iran-based film producer/broker, did not own copyright in motion pictures in respect of which they filed numerous DMCA take down notices on third party platforms against the plaintiff (an internet protocol television content streaming service). The Court agreed that copyright did not subsist in the works because section 5 of the Copyright Act requires a connection between the author/maker or publication and a “treaty country” (i.e., a country that is party to the Berne Convention, Universal Copyright Convention or WIPO Copyright Treaty, or is a World Trade Organization member), Iran is not a party to any of these agreements, the works were produced in Iran, and there was no evidence that at the time the works were created, the producer met the treaty country residency requirements.
Bringing the “wrong” claim was also an issue in Navtech Inc v Chantier Davie Canada Inc, 2025 FC 833, which involved a licensee’s removal of references to the plaintiff from licensed designs and drawings of ships, and replacing it with the licensee’s own logo and reference. The plaintiffs argued this misattribution was a copyright infringement and doubled down on that claim in the face of the defendant’s arguments that this was properly a moral rights claim. The Court dismissed the claim and held that while an allegation of breach of a misattribution prohibition may give rise to a claim in contract, it does not support a claim for copyright infringement, where any copying was performed with the consent of the licensor.
Likewise, in MacDougall v Northwest Territories, 2025 FC 1062, the Federal Court attempted to read between the lines of the self-represented plaintiff’s claim to see whether there was any value to the asserted copyright infringement and ultimately found none. There, the plaintiff had published a website (infobreach.ca) that included content detailing the termination of his employment, the copyright of which he registered, and registered other domains, nwtassembly.ca and nwtassembly.com, and posted content. The plaintiff and the government of the Northwest Territories (his former employer) then engaged in a game of “whack a mole”, as the government brought domain name complaints to the domain registrars with varying successes, and, once available again, the plaintiff re-registered the domains with different registrars. At the hearing of the motion to strike, the Court understood the plaintiff’s argument to be that this conduct interfered with his copyright, and that was enough to create infringement. They did not agree — none of the government’s conduct amounted to an “unauthorised dealing” with the content of the websites.
BONUS: beyond copyright
2025 saw movement in the push to grant artists more rights in their visual works once out of their physical control. The Canadian government’s 2025 budget announced an intent to amend the Copyright Act to include an Artists’ Resale Right. This would ensure artists, and especially visual artists, benefit from royalties whenever their work is resold in an eligible sale. The move aims to provide an additional income stream for visual artists whose median income falls far below the national median for all workers. While not relating to resale royalties, a Québec’s Small Claims Court in Bachand c Mural, 2025 QCCQ 3060 did grant an artist CAD$2,500 in damages for a moral rights infringement after the artist’s mural, which appeared on the side of a building, was obscured by the construct of another building on an adjacent property. See our earlier article on this topic.
Last, outside of the intellectual property law context, a decision of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada in Ullah v Canada (Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness), 2024 CanLII 137206 in 2025 ordered deportation following a determination that the immigration applicant’s convictions for criminal copyright infringement in Portugal were offences equivalent to criminal violations of Canada’s Copyright Act, and this was sufficient to make them inadmissible to Canada for criminality.
Stay tuned
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The preceding is intended as a timely update on Canadian intellectual property and technology law. The content is informational only and does not constitute legal or professional advice. To obtain such advice, please communicate with our offices directly.
References
1. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited v OpenAI, Inc 24-00732231-00CL (Ontario).
2. See Kerry Clare et al v Meta Platforms, Inc, T-1204-25 (Federal); Joan Thomas v Apple Inc et al, T-3831-25 (Federal); James MacKinnon v Anthropic PBC, S-253893 (British Columbia); James MacKinnon v Meta Platforms, Inc, S-252936 (British Columbia); Grescoe c Anthropic PBC 500-06-001394-259 (Quebec); Robillard c Meta Platforms, Inc, 500-06-001369-251 (Quebec).
3. Grescoe c Anthropic PBC, 2025 QCCS 4003.
4. Robillard c Meta Platforms, Inc, 2025 QCCS 1968.
5. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited v OpenAI Inc, 2025 ONSC 6217.
6. Ontario Court of Appeal File No. COA-25-CV-1620.
7. Doan v Clearview AI Inc, 2023 FC 1612.
8. Doan v Clearview AI Inc, 2025 FCA 133.