Asian News International (ANI) filed an appeal in the Delhi High Court on Tuesday, challenging a lower court’s decision to reject its request for an interim injunction against OpenAI. The news agency is seeking to block OpenAI’s use of its content, alleging copyright infringement in the first lawsuit of its kind in India targeting ChatGPT. The matter was listed before a division bench headed by Justice V Kameswar Rao, who was appointed to the Patna High Court on Tuesday.
Content at the center of the dispute
ANI contends that ChatGPT reproduces its original news content verbatim and attributes false statements to the agency. The news outlet argued that this content is being “exploited for commercial gain” by the American artificial intelligence research organization. OpenAI, headquartered in California and founded by Elon Musk in 2015, has countered these claims by asserting that its machine learning process is transformative and that news facts cannot be copyrighted.
The underlying legal battle centers on jurisdiction. OpenAI has argued that its servers are based in the United States and its AI models are not trained in India. The company also suggested that news organizations can request to be placed on a blocklist if they do not wish to be crawled. The single judge rejected ANI’s interim injunction plea, ruling that storing the original works does not amount to copyright infringement under the Copyright Act of 1957. The judge further noted that the process of training the large language models (LLMs) underlying ChatGPT involves screening and organizing the stored literary works.
AI and intellectual property law
ANI’s suit alleges that ChatGPT accredits the agency with statements and news that never occurred, directly impacting the trustworthiness of its reporting. The appeal is now listed for hearing on September 14. This case introduces significant questions regarding the ownership of data in the era of generative AI. As technology companies scrape vast amounts of text to train models, legal systems are struggling to define the boundaries of fair use and original authorship. The outcome may set a precedent for how copyright law adapts to digital innovation, potentially forcing a re-evaluation of how news agencies protect their intellectual property against automated systems that do not create but rather aggregate and reformat information.