'OpenAI's Act Of Storing ANI's Works Does Not Amount To Copyright Infringement': Delhi High Court While Refusing Interim Injunction
The Delhi High Court on Friday (July 24) observed that Artificial Intelligence company OpenAI's act of storing media platform Asian News International's original works does not amount to copyright infringement under the provisions of the Copyright Act, 1957. The court said so while dismissing the interim injunction application filed by ANI in its copyright infringement suit against OpenAI...
The Delhi High Court on Friday (July 24) observed that Artificial Intelligence company OpenAI's act of storing media platform Asian News International's original works does not amount to copyright infringement under the provisions of the Copyright Act, 1957.
The court said so while dismissing the interim injunction application filed by ANI in its copyright infringement suit against OpenAI Inc, which founded ChatGPT.
While pronouncing the interim order Justice Amit Bansal said:
"I am of the prima facie view that Open AI's act of storing ANI's original works...falls under Section 52(1)(a) Copyright Act and therefore does not amount to infringement under Section 51 (Copyright Act). I am also of the prima facie view that outputs generated by ChatGPT...does not amount to copyright infringement under Section 51, since outputs generated by OpenAI were not substantially similar to ANIs..."
For context, Section 52(1)(a) states that the act of "fair dealing" of any work, not being a computer programme, for the purpose private or personal use, including research, criticism or review, whether of that work or of any other work and the reporting of current events and current affairs, would not amount to copyright infringement
Section 51 states the instances which amount to copyright infringement; Section 52 lists the exceptions.
Storing of ANI's work not infringement
The court said that Section 52 independently defines the rights/privileges of a user in respect of copyrighted works and must not be interpreted in a restrictive manner.
The court said that Open AI stores the literary works in a closed space without access to the public. It said that the data obtained by the Large Language Models (LLM-an AI system designed to process, understand, and generate human language) for training purposes is used for private purposes. The court noted that this data is accessible only to the LLM models themselves and is not publicly available to any human entity either for access or for download.
"Therefore, in my opinion, the use amounts to being purely private...," the court said referring to the exception mentioned under Section 52(1)(a).
With respect to the defence of reasearch the court said that process of training LLMs underlying ChatGPT involves machine learning of the stored literary works by screening and organising them.
"In this process, the data is analysed by making extractions from the literary works and converting them into machine-readable training inputs. This data is used to train the LLMs iteratively to rectify errors and generate the most probable statistical output. Accordingly, the process of training of LLMs underlying ChatGPT can be considered as a form of research for generating new knowledge and advancing artificial intelligence systems," the court said.
Giving a purposive interpretation to the provision and applying the "doctrine of updating construction" the court ruled that the expression “research” should be given an updated construction by taking into account the modern-day technical advancements.
"With the advent of these technologies, research/ learning is no longer confined to humans. It is now being done through Artificial Intelligence. However, ultimately the research is at the behest of humans and for the benefit of humans. For example, Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act exempts the act of reproduction by a teacher “in the course of instruction” from the ambit of infringement. If tomorrow a human teacher is replaced by an AI bot or Robot78 to say that the said exception could only be used by a human would be a regressive view. Such an approach would limit societal progress. Therefore, the acts of further research cannot be confined to acts of human being alone and the same would extend to machine learning as well.
Therefore, on a prima facie view, from the above analysis, this Court is of the view that the process of training LLMs underlying ChatGPT undertaken by Open AI using stored literary work of ANI falls under “private or personal use, including research” as provided in Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act and fulfils the purpose test," the court held.
The court referred to the documents filed by Open AI and observed that it demonstrated that the LLMs underlying ChatGPT are not trained to "reproduce or communicate" the training material to the public. Instead, the training material enables it to "generate new responses" and perform novel tasks when presented with novel prompts the court said.
Thus the court ruled that the storage by Open AI is only for the purposes of training Open AI's LLMs underlying ChatGPT and does not constitute infringement.
No substantial regurgitation of ANI's articles by ChatGPT
The court referred to certain prompts and responses given by ChatGPT to the same–which ANI had highlighted to point out similarities–and noticed:
"A comparison of the response given by ChatGPT to the first prompt as highlighted above (in blue) with what was reported by ANI as highlighted above (in orange) shows that the response given by ChatGPT was not a substantial reproduction or nearly exact copy, though the essence of the response is similar as it based on facts i.e. a particular interview of Neeraj Chopra's mother. ChatGPT has added its own commentary to the news article published by ANI, which bears its own expression and is quite dissimilar to the expression used in ANI's article...
In the present case, ANI has only demonstrated that Open AI has extracted a quote from an interview accompanied by its own commentary. According to Section 17(cc)37 of the Copyright Act, the author of an address or speech made in public is the person who made it. The news article gives the quote of what was said by the Neeraj Chopra's mother in the video. Applying the underlying principle of Section 17(cc) of the Copyright Act to the facts of the present case, in the prima facie view of this Court, Neeraj Chopra's mother would be first owner of the copyright in the said quotation".
The court thus said that prima facie, the reproduction of quotes by ChatGPT in its responses would not amount to infringement of ANI's copyright.
The court said that ANI has given fairly detailed, repeated prompts to ChatGPT and had even used the term 'exactly', to extract copyrighted contents from the Large Language Models (LLM-AI system designed to process, understand, and generate human language) underlying ChatGPT, which cannot be termed as non-adversarial.
The court said that even after giving adversarial prompts, ANI was not able to get a response from ChatGPT which can be termed as 'substantial' reproduction of its copyrighted material.
"...the illustrations given in the plaint are post the training of Open AI's LLMs and a case for memorization of ANI's works on the basis of the said illustrations cannot be made out. Therefore, at this prima facie stage, the contention of ANI that Open AI permanently stores the training data in order to memorize and regurgitate ANI's works cannot be accepted.
At best, these are disputed questions which can only be determined during trial upon parties leading evidence. 125. Based on discussion above it cannot be concluded that the responses produced by ChatGPT are a substantial reproduction of the news articles of ANI. Hence, at a prima facie stage, ANI has failed to make out a case of copyright infringement based on the responses generated by ChatGPT i.e. the output claim," the court held.
OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization headquartered in California. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and left the company in 2018. Open AI has founded ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. This is the first lawsuit in India against ChatGPT.
ANI has alleged that its original news content is being “exploited for commercial gain” by OpenAI
ANI's suit alleges that ChatGPT verbatim reproduces ANI's original content in response to users' queries on a real-time basis.
It is ANI's case that ChatGPT has been accrediting it with statements and news that never occurred.
It has been averred that such instances, which are “known as hallucinations”, pose a real threat to the news agency's reputation and spread of fake news which may cause public disorder.
OpenAI challenged the maintainability of the suit in India, arguing its AI models are not trained in the country and its servers are based in the United States.
It also countered by asserting that its machine learning process is transformative, that news facts cannot be copyrighted, and that outlets can request to be placed on a blocklist if they do not wish to be crawled.
Case Title: ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. OpenAI Inc & Anr.