NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Friday refused to restrain artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT from using published news material, saying it does not amount to copyright infringement.
In an interim order, Justice Amit Bansal ruled that OpenAI’s use of retrieved copyrighted works to train its large language models (LLMs) falls under “fair dealing” provision of the Copyright Act.
The court was hearing a petition filed by news agency Asian News International (ANI) in 2024 against Open AI Inc and Open AI OpCo LLC, raising issues of infringement of its copyrighted material for LLM training by OpenAI.
Justice Amit Bansal said that prima facie, the outputs generated by ChatGPT using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique did not amount to infringement under Section 51 of the Copyright Act, since the outputs generated were not substantially similar to ANI’s ‘original literary works’.
“Further, ANI has failed to satisfy this court that any memorization and regurgitation of ANI’s original literary works has happened through the responses generated by ChatGPT,” the judge said, while refusing to restrain ChatGPT from using the content published by ANI.
The bench said that irreparable injury would be caused not only to OpenAI but to public interest also if any interim injunction was granted in favour of ANI at this stage.
According to ANI, merely because its news content is publicly available, OpenAI does not get a right to exploit it or create copies of it to store.
On its part, OpenAI argued that there cannot be a monopoly on facts and that if any news platform does not want its website accessed by OpenAI, then it can get itself included in the blocklist.
Copyright laws vs technological innovation
The HC observed that copyright law and technological innovation enjoy a dynamic relationship. When technologies evolve, they enable new forms of creative expression and disrupt settled copyright arrangements. “Some of these technologies are player pianos, radio broadcasting, cable TV, photocopying, digital downloading and streaming, and, more recently, AI,” it said