The Delhi High Court last week appointed two Amici Curiae seeking their assistance in the lawsuit filed by ANI News against OpenAI. As it is the first of its kind case against OpenAI in India, Justice Amit Bansal determined that the two Amici should be-
(i) A lawyer practicing in the field Of intellectual property including copyright and
(ii) An academician in the field of intellectual property including copyright
In the said lawsuit, ANI has alleged that OpenAI used it’s copyrighted content to train their language models, like the GPT family of large language models. The news agency is seeking Rs.2 Crore in damages.
At the very outset, OpenAI’s counsel Senior Advocate Amit Sibal submitted that the defendants have already blocklisted the plaintiff’s domain ‘www.aninews.in’ in October, 2024. As a result, the said domain will be excluded from the future training of the defendants’ software. This statement was taken on record by the Court and a reply was sought to be filed by the Plaintiff within four weeks.
Thereafter, the Court framed the issues that the present suit raises arising “on account of recent technological advancements. At this stage, some of the key issues that warrant consideration include the following”-
I. Whether the storage by the defendants of plaintiff’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 plaintiff’s copyright.
II. Whether the use by the defendants of plaintiff’s copyrighted data in order to generate responses for its users, would amount to infringement of the plaintiff’s copyright.
III. Whether the defendants’ use of plaintiff’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 defendants are located in the United States of America.
Counsel for both the parties informed the Court that this is the first of its kind Lawsuit filed in India against the defendants. Therefore, there is no Established jurisprudence on the aforesaid issues which arise for consideration.
Mr. Sibal submitted that there have been cases filed against the Defendants in the United States of America as well as other jurisdictions raising similar issues. However, there is no authoritative ruling as on date.
Finally, Justice Bansal observed –
“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.
Accordingly, the Mr Adarsh Ramanujan, Advocate and Dr Arul George Scaria, Professor of Law, National Law School of India University (NLSIU) are appointed as Amici Curiae in the present case to assist the Court.”
In a recent article, authors had analysed OpenAI recent legal victory as a New York Federal Court judge dismissed a copyright lawsuit brought against them by Raw Story Media Inc. and Alternet Media Inc. A lawsuit similar to the one filed ANI was filed by the New York Times against OpenAI alleging copyright infringement.
Author: Nitish Kashyap