The ongoing legal dispute, filed by local news agency ANI, has gained additional momentum with the involvement of these major media players, who argue that OpenAI’s popular AI tool, ChatGPT, is using their news articles and other content to train its language models without compensation. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has previously asserted that Indian courts do not have jurisdiction in the matter, citing that the company’s servers are located abroad.
The filing, which was reviewed by Reuters, highlights the concerns of the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) and several other media outlets, arguing that OpenAI’s actions constitute a “clear and present danger” to their copyrights. The legal papers claim that OpenAI has been involved in “wilful scraping” of content from these news organizations, which they contend undermines their ability to generate revenue from their work and creates an unbalanced power dynamic between tech companies and content creators.
Among the media companies supporting the case are Adani’s NDTV and Ambani’s Network18, along with other notable outlets like Zee News, India Today Group, and The Hindu. Together, these companies represent a broad cross-section of India’s media landscape, which has grown rapidly with the rise of mobile internet access in the country.
OpenAI, for its part, maintains that it engages in partnerships with numerous news organizations globally and uses publicly available data in a manner that adheres to fair use principles to build its AI models. The company has not commented specifically on the new filings from Indian outlets but has repeatedly stressed its commitment to fair use in its operations.
The legal challenge follows a similar case in the US, where the New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its key backer, Microsoft, accusing them of using the newspaper’s articles without permission for AI training purposes. In both India and the US, these lawsuits are part of a broader conversation about how copyright law applies to the rapidly advancing field of generative AI, where large language models require vast amounts of data to function effectively.
The case in India adds to the mounting pressure on OpenAI as it navigates legal challenges from authors, publishers, and musicians globally. Legal experts are debating whether AI companies should be required to pay royalties for the use of copyrighted materials in training their models or if current fair-use provisions are sufficient to allow such practices to continue without compensation.
