IE Online Media Services (Express Group) along with HT Digital Streams, the digital arm of Hindustan Times, NDTV Convergence and the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), filed an intervention application on Monday (January 27) in the Delhi High Court concerning ANI’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.
They sought to be heard, arguing that the legal precedent set by this case will affect how news is collected and shared in the future.
“Either by way of legislation or through independent commercial agreements, over the past 5-7 years, big tech platforms in almost every territory, including India, have a well-established market value for the content generated by news organisations. AI companies like OpenAI have also struck mutually beneficial arrangements in some foreign markets. While in this case, we have intervened on a question of law, the larger question remains as to why AI companies are discriminating against India,” said Anant Goenka, Executive Director of the Indian Express Group.
OpenAI violating intellectual property rights?
The intervention was filed just a day before the next hearing in ANI’s case. The application claims that companies like OpenAI violate intellectual property rights by using news content on their platforms without proper licensing, authorisation or permission. It further states that the outcome of this case will have significant consequences for the livelihoods of journalists employed by DNPA members, as well as the broader Indian news industry.
The application highlights that OpenAI has licensing agreements with global news publishers, such as Associated Press, The Atlantic, and News Corp, to access their content for training its AI models and incorporating it into its outputs. This, the application argues, serves as an acknowledgment that OpenAI requires licenses or permissions to use content for AI training.
Search engines becoming gatekeepers for news access?
The DNPA also pointed out the challenges posed by Big Tech platforms, especially search engines, social media platforms and web scraping services, which monetise news content without compensating the original publishers.
The application underscores that search engines are the primary access point for users seeking news, thereby giving these platforms significant control over audience reach. The DNPA has raised this concern with various authorities, including the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
Federation of Indian Publishers sought to join lawsuit
This month, the Federation of Indian Publishers, another industry body, also sought to join the lawsuit, arguing that the case’s impact extends beyond news publishers and agencies alone.
OpenAI, in its court submissions, has argued that Indian courts lack jurisdiction over the matter, as none of the disputed data was processed or stored within India.
In November, Justice Amit Bansal of the Delhi High Court appointed academic Arul George Scaria and lawyer Adarsh Ramanajun as amici curiae to assist the court in the case.
Globally, several lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Perplexity, and other AI companies for allegedly violating the copyrights of content creators, including news publishers.
These lawsuits generally argue that AI companies use copyrighted and often paywalled content to train their models, resulting in chatbots that divert traffic from the original websites and creators, depriving them of potential revenue. However, none of these lawsuits, including those in the U.S., have been concluded yet.
Additionally, users have filed lawsuits against social media platforms like LinkedIn for allegedly using their private messages and public posts to train AI algorithms without consent.
