Delhi HC dismisses allegations of copyright infringement against ChatGPT
New Delhi: In a relief to OpenAI, the Delhi High Court on Friday dismissed allegations of copyright infringement against the ChatGPT parent, rejecting the lawsuit
New Delhi: In a relief to OpenAI, the Delhi High Court on Friday dismissed allegations of copyright infringement against the ChatGPT parent, rejecting the lawsuit filed by news agency Asian News International (ANI), publishers' bodies and the Indian music industry. The court found no copyright infringement in the San Francisco-based company's use of copyrighted material to train its large language models (LLMs), holding that such use falls within the exceptions under Section 52 of the Copyright Act. In the first-ever lawsuit copyright suit against ChatGPT in India, the court ruled that ChatGPT's outputs were not substantially similar to ANI's copyrighted works and that the news agency had failed to establish that the chatbot memorised or reproduced its original content. The court said granting an injunction against OpenAI would cause irreparable harm not only to the company but also to the public, which benefits from AI services.
The first major ruling on generative AI copyright concerns by an Indian court is likely to influence how courts interpret copyright law in the age of generative AI and define the obligations of AI developers operating in India. The dispute began in November 2024 when news agency Asian News International (ANI) sued OpenAI, alleging that the company used its copyrighted news reports without permission to train ChatGPT. ANI has also claimed that the chatbot can reproduce portions of its content and generate inaccurate or "hallucinated" responses attributed to the agency, potentially harming its credibility. The case later expanded beyond ANI, with the Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP), the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), and the music industry (IMI) joining as intervenors, broadening the copyright challenge to include publishers and music labels. These bodies have argued that using publicly available copyrighted content to train AI models without a licence infringes intellectual property rights and undermines the economic value of original journalism and creativity.
IMI has further alleged that OpenAI used copyrighted sound recordings, lyrics and musical compositions to train its AI models without obtaining licences or permission. OpenAI has denied the allegations. It has argued that copyright protects the expression of ideas, not the underlying facts, and that ANI has failed to identify specific instances where ChatGPT unlawfully reproduced its work. The company has also said it blocked ANI's website from future training of its models in October 2024. OpenAI has said that AI models are trained on publicly available data and learn statistical patterns rather than reproducing copyrighted works The company has further challenged the maintainability of the suit, arguing that Indian courts lack jurisdiction because its servers and core infrastructure are located outside the country. Given the novelty of the issues involved, the court appointed Professor Arul George Scaria of the Law School of India University, Bengaluru, and advocate Adarsh Ramanujan as *amici curiae* to assist it.
The BriefWire