'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 infringementSection 51 states the instances which amount to copyright infringement; Section 52 lists the exceptions. Storing of ANI's work not infringementThe 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 ChatGPTThe 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...

'OpenAI's Act Of Storing ANI's Works Does Not Amount To Copyright Infringement': Delhi High Court While Refusing Interim Injunction

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Malavika Prasad

'OpenAI's Act Of Storing ANI's Works Does Not Amount To Copyright Infringement': Delhi High Court While Refusing Interim Injunction

Malavika Prasad

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Malavika Prasad

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