OpenAI says California apt jurisdiction for copyright suits by Indian news agency

OpenAI Global, LLC repeated an argument in the Delhi High Court on Tuesday (January 28, 2025) that the ChatGPT maker cannot be sued for copyright infringement in Indian courts, as its terms of use bind users to pursue either arbitration or legal action in the courts of California. The hearing came as two industry bodies — the Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP) and the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) — intervened in the case, filed by the newswire agency ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. 

OpenAI’s terms of use are under the “exclusive jurisdiction of courts in California and governed by California law,” senior advocate Amit Sibal, representing OpenAI, said in his arguments. Justice Amit Bansal, who was hearing the case, indicated that the court would consider the jurisdiction question with the other facets of the case holistically, allowing the hearings to proceed.

The court issued notice to OpenAI on the DNPA and FIP’s interventions, with a reply expected within two weeks, at which point it will be decided if these will be admitted in the case.

The court had earlier appointed two friends-of-the-court: Arul George Scaria, a professor at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in Bengaluru, and Adarsh Ramanujan, an advocate working in Delhi and Chennai. Dr. Scaria and Mr. Ramanujan have been asked to help the court with outlining the broad legal questions at play in the case.

“This litigation holds the potential to shape the future of AI research, development, and deployment in India, with implications that could resonate for years to come,” Dr. Scaria said in a statement released by the NLSIU. ANI — along with the intervening associations — has accused the ChatGPT developer of unlawfully using their publicly available content to train its AI models, and has asserted that this constitutes copyright infringement.

The DNPA and FIP represent the digital wings of traditional news media organisations in the print and broadcast space, and the book publishing industry respectively; The Hindu is a member of the DNPA. Justice Bansal said that if DNPA and FIP’s interventions are accepted, the scope of their arguments would be broadly limited to the original suit filed by ANI. Mr. Sibal objected to both associations’ inclusion in the suit, but particularly so to the FIP’s, arguing that ChatGPT isn’t trained on content that isn’t readily available online, such as books and journals behind paywalls that it doesn’t have an agreement to access.

Justice Bansal expressed the court’s discomfort with filings in the case being released to the press, such as the FIP’s intervention and OpenAI’s response to it. He indicated that there may be restrictions on reporting these filings while the case proceeded; the written order wasn’t released by press time, so it is unclear what these restrictions are precisely.