2024-11-19 13:47:26 :
New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Tuesday issued summons to US-based OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in response to a plea of copyright infringement filed by news agency ANI.
In India’s first-ever lawsuit against OpenAI, ANI claims that ChatGPT wrongly attributes political news to the agency, which could lead to the spread of fake news and potentially lead to public disorder.
A single bench headed by Justice Amit Bansal refused to pass any injunction in favor of ANI for now, noting that the case was the first of its kind and was complex and required further deliberations. The court appointed an amicus curiae to assist with the matter and scheduled the case for further hearing in January.
ANI believes that abusive content may damage its reputation and credibility. The agency also argued that there was a public interest angle to the case because misattribution of political content could have far-reaching consequences.
ANI lawyers argued that just because the news content is public, it does not mean that OpenAI has the right to exploit or create copies of it for storage.
“The service also made false attributions about me. For example, it said that Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi gave an interview to ANI without being interviewed. This not only harmed my private rights but also spread fake news ”, said ANI’s lawyer.
OpenAI denies any wrongdoing, arguing that copyright law does not protect facts or ideas, only their expression, and that ANI did not provide any specific instances of ChatGPT copying its copyrighted content.
The American company noted that it faced 13 lawsuits in the United States, as well as two in Canada and one in Germany, but none resulted in an injunction or ruling for copyright infringement.
OpenAI also stressed that its servers are located outside India and no content was copied or used within India, which it claimed made the lawsuit jurisdiction-irrelevant. The company maintains that its AI business is designed to increase creativity and efficiency, and to give content creators the option to prevent their material from being accessed by models.
This is not the first time ANI has taken legal action against technology companies. The news agency previously filed a defamation lawsuit against Wikipedia’s parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. A court has ordered Wikimedia to remove a dedicated Wikipedia page related to ANI’s ongoing defamation lawsuit.
ANI also filed a case in court accusing Netflix India of copyright infringement by using archival footage in the web series IC 814: Kandahar Hijacking, but later withdrew the case.
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