Delhi High Court Rejects ANI's Interim Plea Against ChatGPT, Says It Would Harm Public Interest

The Delhi High Court on Friday (July 24) dismissed the interim injunction application filed by Asian News International (ANI) in its copyright infringement suit against OpenAI Inc, which founded ChatGPT.

Justice Amit Bansal while pronouncing the judgment said that he had ruled in favour of ANI on the issue of territorial jurisdiction. 

The court further 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 5. 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..."

The judge added,

"ANI has failed to satisfy this court that any memorization regurgitation of ANI's work has happened from responses generated by ChatGPT...in view of discussion above ANI has failed to make out prima facie case for grant of interim injunction...Irreparable injury would be caused not only to Open AI but also to the public at large if an interim injunction is granted in favour of ANI. Application dismissed."

A detailed order copy is awaited.

Summons in the suit were issued in November 2024.

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.

Amicus curiae Dr. Arul George Scaria had argued that the High Court has jurisdiction to hear the suit  Scaria is a Professor of Law at National Law School of India University. He said that there are two ways of using a copyrighted material- expressive and non expressive use.

Scaria had said that there is no copyright infringement in non expressive use and expressive use is also permitted in certain cases. He said that most of the times, OpenAI is using ANI's content in non expressive way.

Another amicus curiae in the matter was Advocate Adarsh Ramanujan.

Title: ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. OpenAI Inc & Anr.