Delhi High Court appoints two law experts to assist it in ANI's copyright case against ChatGPT

The Delhi High Court recently appointed advocate Adarsh Ramanujan and Dr. Arul George Scaria (professor of Law at National Law School of India University) as amici curiae in the copyright infringement suit filed by news agency Asian News International (ANI) against OpenAI’s ChatGPT [ANI Media Pvt Ltd V/s Open AI Inc & Anr].

Justice Amit Bansal observed that since the case involves issues related to recent technological advancements, the Court would require the assistance of the experts.

“Considering the range of issues involved in the present suit arising on account of recent technological advancements vis-à-vis copyrights of various copyright owners, this Court is of the view that two Amici Curiae be appointed to assist the Court in this case, (i) a lawyer practicing in the field of intellectual property including copyright and (ii) an academician in the field of intellectual property including copyright,” the Court observed.

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that answers queries of its users.

ANI has moved the High Court alleging that its original content is being exploited by OpenAI for commercial gain and to train the large-language model of ChatGPT for answering the user queries.

On November 19, the Court had issued summons to Open AI and also revealed that it would appoint amicus curie in the case.

In the order released on Monday, the Court noted that the case raises novel legal issues and laid down the following four issues to be considered by it in the matter:

I. Whether the storage by the Open AI of ANI’s data (which is in the nature of news and is claimed to be protected under the Copyright Act, 1957) for training its software i.e. ChatGPT, would amount to infringement of ANI’s copyright.

II. Whether the use by the Open AI of ANI’s copyrighted data in order to generate responses for its users, would amount to infringement of the news agency’s copyright.

III. Whether the Open AI’s use of ANI’s copyrighted data qualifies as ‘fair use’ in terms of Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957.

IV. Whether the Courts in India have jurisdiction to entertain the present lawsuit considering that the servers of the Open AI are located in the United States of America.

In this regard, the Court directed the amici curiae to file a brief note of submissions before the next date of hearing on January 28, 2025.

ANI's suit is the first instance where an Indian media house has sued OpenAI for alleged copyright violation.

Recently, New York Times had sued OpenAI for the unauthorized use of its content to train its platforms. Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Bard AI have also faced lawsuits over the same issue.

Advocates Sidhant Kumar, Akshit Mago, Monyaa Chandok, Om Batra and Anshika Saxena appeared for ANI.

Senior Advocate Amit Sibal with advocates Sanjeev Kapoor, Nirupam Lodha, Madhav Khosla, Moha Paranjpe, Gautam Wadhwa, Malika Nandkedlyar, Rajat Bector, Ankit Handa, Darpan Sachdeva and Saksham Dhingra appeared for Open AI. 

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