Delhi High Court Issues Notice On ANI Appeal Against Rejection Of Interim Injunction Plea Against OpenAI
On Tuesday, 15 September, a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court issued notice on Asian New International (ANI)'s appeal against the rejection of its interim injunction application against OpenAI Inc. in its copyright infringement suit.
Justices Avneesh Jhingan and Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora sought OpenAI's response and listed the appeal for further hearing on 8 December.
Background:
ANI sued OpenAI in November 2024, alleging that ChatGPT was trained on its copyrighted news content without a licence. It also alleged that the chatbot generated responses reproducing or drawing on ANI's work, including fabricated content falsely attributed to the agency.
Given the absence of Indian precedent on AI training and copyright, Justice Amit Bansal appointed IP lawyer Adarsh Ramanujan and NLSIU law professor Dr Arul George Scaria as amici curiae to assist the court.
Justice Bansal subsequently rejected ANI's application for an interim injunction, holding that ANI had “failed to make out a prima facie case” for such relief.
On the merits, the Single Judge held that OpenAI's use of ANI's content to train the large language models underlying ChatGPT fell within the “fair dealing” exception under the Copyright Act and did not amount to infringement.
He also held that ChatGPT's responses were not “substantially similar” to ANI's original content and that there was no evidence of memorisation or reproduction of ANI's work in the chatbot's outputs, including those generated using retrieval-augmented generation technology.
Justice Bansal further observed that the “research” exemption under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act could extend to machine learning. He had also reasoned that if a human researcher could rely on the exemption, restricting it to humans when an AI system performs a similar function “would be a regressive view” that would limit societal progress.