ANI logo. Image from here
As highlighted yesterday, the first hearing in the ANI MEDIA PVT LTD V/s OPEN AI INC & ANR. took place today with the Delhi HC issuing summons to OpenAI.
As reported by Bar and Bench, ANI sought an interim injunction against the unauthorised use and storage of its copyright work by Open AI to train its large language models (LLMs) -ChatGPT. ANI alleged that such use constitutes copyright infringement and thus filed the present suit against OpenAI. ANI also submitted that it has previously issued a notice to Open AI against the alleged unlawful storage and use, who responded by acknowledging the use of ANI’s content. Substantiating the allegations of copyright infringement, ANI also pointed to the issue of false attribution to ANI over incorrect information which may give rise to dissemination of misinformation and fake news.
In response, OpenAI opposed the suit making two important arguments. On jurisdiction, OpenAI submitted that there is an issue of maintainability of suit as there are no OpenAI chatbot servers located in India. We also understand that in addition to what has been reported in the above piece, OpenAI argued that there is no instance in the present suit wherein the plaintiff has shown that there is reproduction of plaintiff’s content in India. On interim injunctions, OpenAI submitted that no injunctions have been granted by courts in the different ongoing cases against it in the US, Canada and Germany. The Court recorded OpenAI’s statement that they have blocked ANI’s website to ensure that its content is not used by ChatGPT.
Here, OpenAI seems to be taking the “opt-out” defence where it allows websites to be blocked if they are informed of any content infringement. But ANI’s counsel flagged that there is difficulty even after blocking the website since the same content is reproduced by other websites. It will be interesting to see how this argument plays out! On the allegation of fake news, OpenAI submitted that they have addressed and reported responses where misleading responses attributable to ANI were reported, arguing that these instances are rare.
Presently, the reporting doesn’t say if any injunction has been passed or not but states that the Court has issued notice to OpenAI. The Court mentioned that an amicus curiae will be appointed for the range of issues in the case.
The order by the court has not been uploaded yet and in case any reader is able to get hold of a copy, please share it with us!
To analyse the underlying issues and arguments, we will have a more in-depth take on this coming up soon!