India- ANI Media Pvt Ltd V. OpenAI OPCO LLC, 4 July 2025 (hearing)

Claimant: ANI Media Pvt Ltd 

Defendant: OpenAI OPCO LLC 

Both parties have made their opening arguments. No interim injunction was granted against OpenAI’s operations; the DHC observed that immediate harm was not evident since OpenAI stopped using ANI content by removing it from its web crawlers.

On July 4, 2025, the DHC disposed of various intervention applications, permitting the intervenors to argue only on legal issues. The Claimant's counsel presented arguments in rejoinder. Subsequent hearings in July and August focused on submissions from the intervenors. The case is now listed for further submissions from the remaining intervenors on 12 September 2025 and 23 September 2025.

1. Asian News International (“ANI”), is a leading multimedia news agency with over 100 bureaus in India and across the globe. ANI’s  range of products include edited news feeds and customized programmes for television channels, audio bytes for radio stations, live web casting and streamed multimedia / text content for websites and mobile carriers, and news wire services for newspapers, magazines, and websites.
2. ANI is seeking to restrain Open AI from using ANI’s copyright materials to train its AI models.  
3. ANI sought in October 2024 to block its s domain i.e. ‘www.aninews.in’ from being used to train  Open AI’s systems
4. The primary issues pending before DHC are as follows:
   1. Whether the storage of ANIs data for training Open AI’s ChatGPT system amounts to infringement? ;
   2. Whether the use of data to generate responses for users of ChatGPT amount to infringement?
   3. Whether Open AI’s use of ANI copyrighted materials qualifies as Fair Use under S. 52 of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957 ? ;
   4. Whether Indian Courts have jurisdiction for the present lawsuit? 
5. The DHC appointed 2 Amici Curiae owing to the range of issues involving varied technological advancements: 1) Practicing Lawyer in the field of IPR, including Copyright; 2) Academician in the same field. Accordingly, Mr. Adarsh Ramanujan, Advocate and Dr. Arul George Scaria, Professor of Law, National Law School of India University (NLSIU) were appointed to assist the Court.
6. Given the potential precedent-setting nature of case, numerous other stakeholders sought to intervene in the proceedings on one side or the other.
   1. The Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) – an industry body representing major Indian news outlets, Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP), Indian Music Industry (IMI) filed intervention applications to join the ongoing suit and express their respective  concerns from the use of data by Open AI. 
   2. An independent think-tank, the Indian Governance and Policy Project (IGPP) sought to offer views on broader policy implications of AI and copyright. 
   3. On the other side, Flux Labs, an Indian AI startup, intervened to support OpenAI’s stance and argued that merely extracting non-expressive elements of data for training should not count as infringement.

1. ANI sought an injunction restraining Open AI, or any person acting on their behalf, either directly or indirectly, from storing, publishing, reproducing or in any manner using, including through ChatGPT model, the copyrighted works of ANI.
2. It has also sought an order from the Court to direct Open AI to disable access of ChatGPT to ANI’s published works.

ANI’s Claims

1. ANI claims that Open AI is using its copyrighted material without permission to train its AI models.
2. ANI claim that ChatGPT gives false information as output and cites the ANI’s news agency as its source, thereby posing a threat to its reputation and leading to the spread of misinformation in the digital sphere.
3. While some of ANI’s content is publicly available content, this does not grant to Open AI the right to exploit or copy its copyright works. 

OpenAI’s Defence

1. Jurisdiction: Open AI claims that the DHC’s Commercial Division lacks jurisdiction, as it combines multiple causes of action, some of which fall outside its competence as for “commercial disputes” as defined under the Commercial Courts Act, 2015..”
2. Open AI claims it is not responsible for the operation of the services provided by ChatGPT, nor is it the owner or lessee of the servers on which the training data is stored. Open AI further claim that none of the training of its AI model takes place in India
3. Open AI claims that Indian Copyright law protects expression and not underlying facts. Since the models do not store or provide identical reproductions in the input materials, it does not infringe copyright. Open AI claim they have only used freely available information to provide its analytic processes and that it has no purpose or intent to coy ANI materials.
4. Open AI contends that the output produced by ChatGPT is protected under “fair use”- “transformative purposes, such as machine training, are not substantial reproduction of original work itself.”  1 Further Open AI argues that ANI’s copyright works constitutes factual content which is not capable of protection as copyright works.
5. During the course of the oral arguments heard on 22 April 2025, the DHC questioned whether excerpts from an exclusive interview can be reproduced by someone else. The question was posed to understand whether any entity has the right to reproduce, through different words and expressions (or by mere paraphrasing), an interview that was conducted by someone with their expenses and resources. Open AI’s counsel answered that interviewers do not get ownership or authorship of facts/ideas disclosed by an interviewee. It was further argued that an exclusive interview will be solely owned by the speakers/interviewees as there is no originality on the part of the journalist.
6. Open AI has also submitted that ANI has attempted to manipulate the model by providing deliberate prompts containing excerpts of their news articles, thereby attempting to force it to recreate the content. However, as ChatGPT presents different responses based on patterns, it demonstrated its ability to generate original words. They submitted that regurgitation is almost an impossible outcome and frowned upon in the concept of LLMs.
7. Open AI also submitted that “hallucinations” of ChatGPT are within the limitations of the model and do not constitute actual harm to the news agency’s reputation, thereby negating the claims of defamation.
8. Open AI additionally submitted that there is no allegation or evidence of commercial harm, or loss of revenue suffered by ANI and that ChatGPT drives traffic to ANI's website. Open AI further clarified that ChatGPT has various purposes, and it is not a competitor to ANI in the news service. 

ANI’s Response to Open AI’s arguments:

On 4 July 2025, arguments in rejoinder were presented by ANI where it argued that:

1. On whether news items are capable of holding copyright, the counsel for ANI relied on the principle established in the RG Anand v. M/S Delux Films & Ors case wherein it was held that ‘copyright subsists in the expression of an idea, not in the idea itself’. ANI contended that if this distinction is not maintained, it would effectively exclude all non-fiction works (including journalism, legal writing, historical narratives, etc.) from copyright protection, which cannot be the law. It argued that merely because a work is in the nature of a news report, it does not automatically exclude it from limited copyright protection. The factual content may be in the public domain, but the manner of presentation, narrative structure, and original selection of facts can still be protected. 
2. In response to OpenAI's argument that ANI is not the first owner of copyright under Section 17 of the Copyright Act, 1957, ANI submitted several commercial agreements, characterized as employment or professional contracts, to demonstrate its ownership of the interviews. These included documentation showing that the interviews were conducted by ANI’s Chief Editor, an employee of the organization. ANI also cited specific contractual clauses to establish that the works were either created under a contract of service or were expressly assigned to ANI. Additionally, several affidavits were submitted by the authors themselves, affirming that ANI is indeed the first owner of the copyright in question.
3. In response to OpenAI’s reliance on the fair use exception under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957 (specifically, the clause relating to “private and personal use including research”), ANI argued that such use does not fall within the scope of this provision. ANI contended that the mere fact that content is publicly accessible on its website does not amount to a license for unrestricted use. They further asserted that the defense of "public availability" applies only when the copyright has either expired or has been expressly relinquished by the author. Moreover, ANI argued that where the predominant purpose of use is commercial, the “research” exception cannot be invoked. Since OpenAI operates on a subscription-based model and uses the content for commercial purposes, ANI claimed that it cannot avail itself of the “research” defence.

Submissions of the Intervenors

A. Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) and The Indian Music Industry (IMI).

1. In early August 2025, it was argued that the unlicensed "scraping, storing, and reproducing" of news articles by AI models threatens the survival of journalism by reducing the incentive to create content. A warning was issued by the counsel for DNPA that "Physical newspapers are disappearing, digital news will disappear, and only ChatGPT will remain".
2. The submission was made that infringement occurs the moment content is downloaded without permission, stating, "Even storing an infringing copy for a transient moment amounts to infringement".
3. It was argued that India's "fair dealing" is a closed list of specific exceptions, unlike the more open-ended "fair use" doctrine in the U.S.. The argument followed that OpenAI does not qualify for any of the specific exceptions for reproduction under Indian law.
4. In response to the defence that facts cannot be copyrighted, it was clarified that while facts themselves are not protected, the "expression of those facts" is what receives copyright protection.

B. AI-based shopping platform Zoop (Flux Labs)

1. It was submitted that AI tools like ChatGPT synthesize and compile publicly available information and do not reproduce works verbatim.
2. The argument was made that the outputs are closer to derivative works and that "there is neither reproduction of the whole work nor any substantial part thereof, and mere storage per se does not constitute infringement".