'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 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. 

A detailed copy of the order is awaited. 

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.