Delhi High Court Rejects ANI’s Interim Plea in ChatGPT Copyright Dispute

The Delhi High Court on July 24 dismissed Asian News International’s (ANI) application seeking an interim injunction against OpenAI in its copyright infringement lawsuit over ChatGPT, holding that the news agency had failed to establish a prima facie case for interim relief.

Justice Amit Bansal, while pronouncing the order, ruled that the court has territorial jurisdiction to hear the matter but declined to restrain OpenAI from using ANI’s content at this stage.

“I am of the prima facie view that OpenAI’s act of storing ANI’s original works… falls under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act and therefore does not amount to infringement under Section 5,” the judge said.

The court also held that ChatGPT’s responses do not constitute copyright infringement under Section 51 of the Copyright Act because the outputs generated by OpenAI are not substantially similar to ANI’s original works.

The court found no evidence that ChatGPT had memorised and reproduced ANI’s content. “ANI has failed to satisfy this court that any memorisation regurgitation of ANI’s work has happened from responses generated by ChatGPT,” Bansal said.

A detailed copy of the order is awaited.

The case, in which summons were issued in November 2024, is the first copyright lawsuit against ChatGPT in India. ANI has alleged that OpenAI commercially exploited its original news content by using it to train ChatGPT without permission. 

It also claimed that the chatbot could reproduce its reports verbatim and sometimes attributed fabricated statements to the news agency through AI “hallucinations”, harming its reputation and potentially spreading misinformation.

OpenAI contested the maintainability of the suit before Indian courts, arguing that its AI models were trained outside India and that its servers are located in the United States. The company also argued that its training process is transformative, that factual news cannot be protected by copyright, and that publishers can opt out of web crawling through a blocklist if they do not want their content used.