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Indian publishers join ANI’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI in Delhi HC

Jan 25, 2025 05:16 AM IST

Indian publishers seek to join ANI's lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming copyright infringement as ChatGPT used their works for training. Hearing on Jan 28.

An industry body of Indian publishers sought to join news agency ANI’s copyright infringement lawsuit against American artificial intelligence giant OpenAI filed earlier this month, stating that OpenAI trained its software on copyrighted literary works published by the member-publishers. The matter is set to be heard on January 28, along with ANI’s main suit.

The publishers said that OpenAI trained its software on copyrighted literary works. (REUTERS)
The publishers said that OpenAI trained its software on copyrighted literary works. (REUTERS)

The Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP), whose members include Bloomsbury India, Penguin Random House, Pan Macmillan India, Rupa Publications, Wiley India, and scores of Indian publishers of school and college textbooks, such as APC and S. Chand, filed the impleadment application on ­­­­January 8.

In its application, it had argued that it received “credible evidence/information” from its members that OpenAI trained its software, ChatGPT, using “the original literary works of various members” of FIP.

FIP’s application was heard by joint registrar (judicial) Dr Ajay Gulati on January 10 who issued notice and allowed OpenAI to file a response by January 27.

In the suit, FIP cited four examples to show that ChatGPT had been trained on/had access to the members' published, copyrighted books. For instance, on prompting ChatGPT, the chatbot gave summaries of articles in a peer-reviewed journal called “Journal of Psychosocial Research” published by Prints Publications, and detailed summary of “Financial Management”, written by Prasanna Chandra and published by PHI Learning.

Reuters first reported about FIP’s lawsuit on Friday.

FIP argued that the matters concerning copyright have “far reaching impact on the Indian publishing industry”, and the impact is not limited to news publishers and agencies. It also argued that it was able to assist the court in four questions that the court had raised in the its November 18 order: first, if storage of ANI’s news data to train OpenAI’s software was copyright infringement; second, if using this data to generate responses was copyright infringement; third, if OpenAI’s use of ANI’s data is “fair use”; and fourth, if Indian courts have jurisdiction when OpenAI’s servers are in the USA.

OpenAI, in court and in its submission, had argued that Indian courts did not have the jurisdiction since none of the data in question was processed or stored in India.

At the time, the single-judge bench of justice Amit Bansal had appointed two amici curiae, Dr Arul George Scaria (NLSIU Bangalore) and Adarsh Ramanajun (advocate), to assist the court with these four questions.

This is only the latest in the litany of lawsuits that have been filed against OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Perplexity and other AI companies around the world for violating the copyright of different kinds of content creators, including news publishers, literary publishers, and music producers. Most lawsuits argue that the AI companies use copyrighted (and often paywalled content) to train their models, churn out results in chatbots, drive online traffic away from the original websites and creators, thus depriving them of revenue.

None of the lawsuits anywhere in the world, including in the US, have yet concluded.

A different spate of lawsuits has also been filed by users against social media companies, such as LinkedIn, for using their private messages and public posts to train their AI algorithms without consent.

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