ANI moves Delhi high court division bench in OpenAI case

The agency argued OpenAI had scraped, stored and commercially exploited its work, infringing its exclusive rights under copyright law.

News agency ANI has moved a division bench of the Delhi high court against a single judge’s order dismissing its plea to restrain OpenAI from using its content to train ChatGPT.

ANI has appealed against a single judge’s July 24 order that rejected its plea seeking to restrain OpenAI from using its content to train ChatGPT. (Reuters)

ANI’s appeal against the July 24 verdict was listed before a bench of justices V Kameshwar Rao and Manmeet PS Arora. However, it was adjourned to September 14 as the bench did not assemble.

ANI challenges Delhi HC ruling on OpenAI’s use of news content

On July 24, Justice Amit Bansal dismissed ANI’s plea, holding that OpenAI’s use of the news agency’s material for training its large language model (LLM) fell within the statutory exception of “fair dealing” under Indian copyright law.

The judge said the use qualified as “private use” under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957. The provision permits fair dealing of copyrighted material for private or personal use, including research, criticism, review and reporting of current events.

Justice Bansal, in his 135-page verdict, reasoned that the training data was accessible only to the AI model during the learning process and was not made available to the public for viewing or downloading.

ANI, in its appeal, argued that the injunction was denied without adequately considering OpenAI’s alleged admission that it had scraped, stored and commercially exploited the agency’s work. The agency contended that such acts infringed its exclusive rights under the Copyright Act, including the rights to store, reproduce, adapt and translate its original works.