Delhi high court summons OpenAI in ANI’s copyright infringement plea
- The court did not pass any injunction in favor of ANI, noting that the case is the first of its kind and is complex, requiring further deliberation. The court will further hear the matter in January.
New Delhi: The Delhi high court on Tuesday issued summons to US-based OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in response to a copyright infringement plea filed by news agency ANI.
In the first-ever lawsuit against OpenAI in India, ANI claimed that ChatGPT falsely attributed political news to the agency, which could lead to the spread of fake news and potentially cause public disorder.
The single bench, led by justice Amit Bansal, declined to pass any injunction in favour of ANI for now, noting that the case is the first of its kind and complex, requiring further deliberation. The court appointed an amicus curiae to assist in the matter and scheduled the case for further hearing in January.
ANI argued that misuse of content could harm its reputation and credibility. The agency also contended that there is a public interest angle to the case, as the incorrect attribution of political content could have far-reaching consequences.
The ANI counsel argued that just because news content is publicly available, it does not grant OpenAI the right to exploit or create copies of it for storage.
"This service also gives a false attribution to me. For example, it says Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition, gave an interview to ANI when no interview was given. That is the propensity to not just hurt my private rights but also spread fake news," the counsel for ANI stated.
OpenAI, denying any wrongdoing, argued that copyright laws do not protect facts or ideas, only their expression, and that ANI has not provided any specific instances of its copyrighted content being reproduced by ChatGPT.
The US company pointed to 13 lawsuits it has faced in the US, along with two in Canada and one in Germany, none of which have resulted in injunctions or rulings of copyright infringement.
OpenAI also emphasized that its servers are located outside India, and no content is reproduced or used within the country, which it claims makes the lawsuit jurisdictionally irrelevant. The company maintained that its AI operations are designed to enhance creativity and efficiency, and it offers content creators the option to block their material from being accessed by the model.
This is not the first time ANI has taken legal action against tech companies. The news agency previously filed a defamation lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia. The court had ordered Wikimedia to take down a dedicated Wikipedia page related to the ongoing defamation lawsuit filed by ANI.
ANI had also moved the court against Netflix India for copyright infringement over the use of archival footage in the web series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, although it later withdrew the case.
A spokesperson for OpenAI, in a statement, said, “…we build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal precedents.”
While OpenAI has been dragged into Indian courts for the first time, it has been facing a wave of copyright lawsuits worldwide over alleged copyright violations. Among these, the most prominent is a lawsuit filed by The New York Times, which has become one of the most high-profile legal battles concerning generative AI and copyright infringement. The case revolves around allegations that OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, used The Times’ copyrighted articles without authorization to train its large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT.
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First Published:19 Nov 2024, 01:47 PM IST
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