Blitz Bureau
THE Delhi High Court recently appointed advocate Adarsh Ramanujan and Dr. Arul George Scaria (professor of Law at National Law School of India University) as amici curiae in the copyright infringement suit filed by news agency Asian News International (ANI) against OpenAI’s ChatGPT , according to Bar and Bench.
Justice Amit Bansal observed that since the case involves issues related to recent technological advancements, the court would require the assistance of the experts. ANI has moved the High Court alleging that its original content is being exploited by OpenAI for commercial gain and to train the large-language model of ChatGPT for answering the user queries.
On November 19, the court had issued summons to Open AI and also revealed that it would appoint amicus curie in the case.
The court noted that the case raises novel legal issues and laid down the following four issues to be considered by it in the matter: whether the storage by the Open AI of ANI’s data (which is in the nature of news and is claimed to be protected under the Copyright Act, 1957) for training its software i.e. ChatGPT, would amount to infringement of ANI’s copyright; whether the use by the Open AI of ANI’s copyrighted data in order to generate responses for its users, would amount to infringement of the news agency’s copyright; whether the Open AI’s use of ANI’s copyrighted data qualifies as ‘fair use’ in terms of Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957 and whether the courts in India have jurisdiction to entertain the present lawsuit considering that the servers of the Open AI are located in the United States of America.
In this regard, the court directed the amici curiae to file a brief note of submissions before the next date of hearing on January 28, 2025. ANI’s suit is the first instance where an Indian media house has sued OpenAI for alleged copyright violation.