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The Delhi High Court on Friday ruled that OpenAI's use of copyrighted material to train its AI models does not amount to copyright infringement, rejecting an interim injunction sought by news agency ANI in its copyright lawsuit against the company.
Justice Amit Bansal held that OpenAI's act of storing ANI's works for training its Large Language Models (LLMs) does not, by itself, violate copyright law. The court also found that ANI had failed to establish a prima facie case that ChatGPT had memorised or reproduced its copyrighted content in its responses.
Pronouncing the order, Justice Bansal observed, “OpenAI's act of storing ANI's works does not amount to copyright infringement,” adding, “ANI had failed to show that any memorization or regurgitation of ANI's work has happened from responses generated by ChatGPT.’
The court said that granting an interim injunction would have wider consequences beyond the parties involved.
Justice Bansal highlighted that irreparable injury would be caused not only to OpenAI but also to the public at large if an interim injunction is granted. The court noted that restricting AI companies from training their models using copyrighted material could adversely affect technological innovation and scientific progress.
ANI filed the lawsuit in November 2024, alleging that OpenAI had used its copyrighted news reports without permission to train ChatGPT. The agency sought Rs. 2 crore in damages and asked the court to permanently restrain the company from storing, publishing, reproducing or using its content.
The news agency argued that ChatGPT generated responses that were ‘verbatim or substantially similar’ to its reports. It also alleged that the chatbot produced ‘hallucinated’ responses falsely attributed to ANI.
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OpenAI, however, rejected the claims and stated that its AI models are trained based on publicly available data. According to the court, OpenAI told the court that it has blacklisted the domain name of ANI in October 2024, following which no new content from the website can be used for training any AI model.
According to senior counsel Amit Sibal, who is representing OpenAI, “Copyright protects the expression of ideas; there is no monopoly on facts.” He also submitted that OpenAI's servers are located outside India.
The case represents one of the first landmark cases in India concerning the use of copyrighted works for training generative AI.
