Madras High Court Protects Travel Content From Alleged AI Scraping, Grants Interim Relief

The Madras High Court on 1 July granted an ad-interim injunction in favour of Keshan Infotech Pvt Ltd, restraining alleged unauthorised scraping and AI-driven use of its digital travel content.

Justice K. Kumaresh Babu held that the unauthorised use of proprietary content as training data or prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs) raises a prima facie case of copyright infringement warranting immediate judicial intervention. He directed that “there shall be an order of injunction as prayed for, for a period of four (4) weeks.”

Keshan Infotech Pvt Ltd operates www.travelandtourworld.com. The company alleged that its travel-related content was being systematically scraped by an Italian editor and republished on social media platforms, with the applicant's logo retained while the original authorship was masked.

Senior Advocate Rudraman Bhattacharya, appearing for the applicant, sought four injunctions, including restraint against reproduction, translation, summarisation, or paraphrasing of its content “whether by human authorship or through any automated AI-assisted or algorithmic process.”

He further sought to restrain the use of its website content as “training data or prompt for any artificial intelligence model, large language model, automated content generation tool, web scraper or any other software or application.”

The Court noted that a prima facie reading of the plaint showed that the applicant was a travel vlogger producing original content, and observed that the allegations were supported by the first respondent's social media posts annexed to the plaint.

Accordingly, the High Court allowed all four applications and granted an ad-interim injunction for four weeks. It further directed notice to be issued to the respondents, returnable in four weeks, and permitted private service through speed post.