HT Digital Streams, Hindustan Times’s digital arm, IE Online Media Services Private Limited (Express Group), NDTV Convergence, and industry body Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) on Monday filed an intervention application in the Delhi high court in news agency ANI’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. They sought to be heard as the jurisprudence set by the case will impact how news is collected and disseminated. The Times Group, which is a DNPA member, is not part of the application.
The intervention application was filed a day before the next hearing in the ANI case. It argued that companies such as OpenAI violate intellectual property rights when they use their content and information on their websites and other platforms without licences, authorisation, or permissions. The outcome of this case will also affect the livelihoods of journalists DNPA members employ and the entire Indian news industry, it added.
The application said that OpenAI has licensing deals with international news publishers such as Associated Press, The Atlantic, and News Corp, to access their content to train OpenAI’s models and to use it in their outputs. It added this is an admission that OpenAI needs licenses or permissions to use the content to train AI models.
The DNPA said it has been trying to address the challenges Big Tech platforms, particularly search engines, social media platforms, and web scraping services, posed. It said that such entities often monetise news content without giving any compensation to the publishers.
The intervention application said search engines act as the primary gateway for users when accessing news, giving them increased control over audience reach. The DNPA has argued this at multiple fora, including before the Union information and broadcasting ministry.
The Federation of Indian Publishers, another industry body, this month sought to join the lawsuit, arguing that the impact of the case is not limited to news publishers and agencies.
OpenAI has in the court and its submissions argued that Indian courts do not have the jurisdiction since none of the data in question was processed or stored in India.
On November 18, the single-judge bench of Justice Amit Bansal appointed academic Arul George Scaria and lawyer Adarsh Ramanajun as amici curiae to assist the court in the matter.
Lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Perplexity, and other AI companies globally for violating the copyrights of content creators, including news publishers. Most of them argue that AI companies use copyrighted and often paywalled content to train their models, churn out results in chatbots, and drive online traffic away from the original websites and creators, thus depriving them of revenue. None of the lawsuits anywhere, including in the US, have yet concluded.
Users have also filed lawsuits against social media companies such as LinkedIn for using their private messages and public posts to train AI algorithms without consent.