OpenAI is facing yet another copyright infringement lawsuit, this time in India, filed by a group of Indian book publishers and their international partners. Indian billionaires Mukesh Ambani’s Network18 and Gautam Adani’s NDTV are also joining the list of plaintiffs, along with some other popular news outlets from the country. According to a report by Reuters, Indian media outlets have now filed a petition in the Delhi High Court to join an ongoing lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker.
The latest lawsuit against OpenAI was reportedly filed in December 2024 at the Delhi High Court. Interestingly, the court is already hearing a copyright violation case against OpenAI, filed by news agency ANI. However, the lawsuit has been filed by the Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP). FIP represents some prominent publishers, including Bloomsbury, Penguin Random House, Cambridge University Press, Pan Macmillan, Rupa Publications, and S. Chand and Co.
The plaintiffs demand that OpenAI immediately cease accessing their copyrighted works, such as books and online content. They stated that either the company agrees to or negotiates licensing agreements, or it must delete the datasets used in AI model training.
Now, the Indian Express, Hindustan Times, NDTV, and the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) have reportedly filed a petition in court to join this ongoing lawsuit. Notably, DNPA is an association of some of the largest media houses in the country, including The Hindu, Network18, Zee News, Dainik Bhaskar, India Today Group, and more.
The plaintiffs believe Microsoft-backed AI trendsetter OpenAI ‘s practices directly harm their ownership rights over their content, particularly in the digital domain. The company is accused of systematically extracting and using content without permission to train its large language models. Meanwhile, the petitioners also argue that the content is being modified or repurposed, which could further infringe on copyright laws.
Interestingly, the development comes at a time when, recently, while arguing the ANI case in court, OpenAI stated that any directive to delete training data would breach its legal obligations in the United States. The AI trendsetter company also argued that its actions are legally justified because ANI’s material is publicly available. In fact, OpenAI contended that Indian courts do not have the authority to handle a copyright case because the servers involved are located outside of India.
However, a copyright violation lawsuit is not a new thing for OpenAI. Earlier in 2023, The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging that they used its content to train LLM models without consent. Even after a month of the NYT case, nonfiction authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage also filed a class-action lawsuit against both companies for illegally using their copyrighted works.
Before this, social media giant Meta also faced a copyright infringement lawsuit in 2023 from a group of authors. In the amended lawsuit, the group of plaintiffs alleges that Meta used pirated content to train its LLaMA AI models with permission from its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
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