The Delhi High Court's July 24 decision has established a comprehensive framework for addressing AI copyright disputes in India, marking the first time a broad judicial approach has been adopted for AI-related copyright issues in the country. This case is not just India's first AI copyright case, but the case that will determine whether Indian creators have rights that the law can actually protect in the age of AI. The Delhi High Court's eventual judgment will be scrutinised across the world, with what it says about Section 52 of the Copyright Act shaping the entire architecture of AI and copyright in India for the decade ahead. The 135-page verdict delivered by Justice Amit Bansal could potentially set the terms of engagement between AI firms, publishers and rights holders for years to come.
In 2024, ANI Media accused the San Francisco-based AI research organisation of scraping, storing and using ANI copyrighted news articles to train large language models (LLMs) underlying ChatGPT. As reported by Business Standard, the dispute centered on OpenAI's alleged reproduction of large portions of ANI's content while generating responses to user prompts. ANI Media has filed suit with the Delhi High Court seeking ₹2 crores in monetary damages and a permanent injunction against OpenAI's continued use of its content. The dispute over copyright between Asian News International and OpenAI is built around the plaintiff's claim that the defendant infringed on its copyright by using articles — many of which are subject to paywalls — in order to train ChatGPT. ANI has alleged that ChatGPT reproduced certain content from its proprietary journalism whenever it was queried, and has sought monetary damages as well as an injunction that would prevent OpenAI from using any additional content. The order last week dealt with ANI's interim application, which sought to stop OpenAI from further use of the agency's work pending the full trial, with the broader suit to be heard starting September 11.
The court's decision addressed key issues concerning territorial jurisdiction and interpretations of Section 52 of the Copyright Act. OpenAI's first line of defence was jurisdictional, arguing that its LLM was trained outside India on servers stored abroad, meaning California courts alone could decide the matter and the Indian Copyright Act did not apply. However, Justice Amit Bansal agreed with ANI's counter-argument using Section 62(2) of the Act, which lets a copyright owner sue where it resides or carries on business. The court held that storing the works on US servers was only the final step in a chain that began with copyrighted material being accessed in India. "On a prima facie view, Open AI's argument is untenable as it would lead to evasion of Indian copyright law by infringers who shift the terminal link to servers abroad," the court said. The legal foundation rests on Section 14 of the Act, which provides that a copyright owner has the exclusive right to control the reproduction of a literary work, expressly including the electronic storage of the work by any means. Section 51 states that copyright is infringed when a person has engaged in conduct prohibited by the Act and has reproduced or electronically stored a work without having obtained an appropriate licence from the copyright owner.
The court's ruling established that outputs generated by ChatGPT using the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique were not substantially similar to ANI's original literary works, and therefore did not amount to infringement under Section 51 of the Copyright Act. OpenAI countered that its models do not store third-party text but generate fresh responses designed to avoid regurgitation, and that ChatGPT functions merely as an interface between users and content. The court sided with OpenAI on this technical defence, finding that the 'transformative work' mirage has limited authority in India, as there is no separately codified defence of transformative use in the Indian Copyright Act. The 'private use' exception is aimed at individual users for non-commercial personal reasons, but OpenAI's training of ChatGPT represents large-scale, systematic, and unmistakably commercial use. The 'criticism or review' exception requires commenting on or evaluating the work in question, whereas OpenAI's training is clearly not a commentary or evaluation of ANI's journalism, but wholesale copying for commercial use.
The Delhi High Court's ruling that OpenAI did not break Indian copyright law by using news agency ANI's material to train ChatGPT has significant implications for the broader publishing and AI industry. The proceedings drew interventions from the Indian Music Industry, the Federation of Indian Publishers and the Digital News Publishers Association — a measure of how much publishers, musicians and news organisations see riding on the outcome. The court also appointed two experts to help navigate the technology: Professor Arul George Scaria of the National Law School of India University, who took the view that storing ANI's data to train the model was not infringement, and advocate Adarsh Ramanujan, who argued that copying data without consent was infringing unless justified as fair use. The case highlights India's lack of a coherent legal framework for AI and copyright, with resolving disputes through litigation after the fact being an inadequate substitute for clear legislative solutions. Three immediate reforms are urgently needed: Parliament should implement a clear TDM exception with opt-out provisions, require commercial use of copyrighted data for AI training to require either a licence or payment of reasonable royalties, and mandate all AI developers operating in India to publicly disclose datasets used for training purposes.
