Digital News Publishers Association joins copyright suit against ChatGPT maker in Delhi HC

The Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), which represents the digital arms of several mainstream TV and print organisations in India, has intervened in a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT.

“This intervention highlights the significant concerns expressed by digital news publishers about the unauthorised mass copying and use of copyrighted works to train AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT models,” the DNPA said in a statement. The Hindu is a member of the DNPA.

The intervention was filed in an ongoing case initiated by news agency Asian News International (ANI).

“In its recent order dated 19 November 2024, the Hon’ble Delhi High Court recognised and framed several significant legal questions arising from the ANI v. OpenAI case,” the DNPA said.

“These questions concentrate on OpenAI’s extensive and, in DNPA’s view, unlawful ingestion of Indian copyrighted content, which poses important implications for intellectual property rights in the digital age and the news industry in India.”

The intervention comes as news organisations around the world grapple with the consequences of large language models (LLMs) and conversational chat agents being trained on their data, often scraped from the Internet without any agreements in hand.

“The issue of web scraping, where third-party entities extract and repurpose content without authorisation/license/permission, threatens the intellectual property rights of publishers,” the DNPA said in its filing.

AI platforms, like social media firms, “monetise news Content and other Content by embedding Content within their ecosystems, often without adequately compensating the original publishers”, the association added.

“We take great care in our products and design process to support news organizations,” an OpenAI spokesperson told The Hindu in response to a query on the DNPA intervention. “We are actively engaged in constructive partnerships and conversations with many news organizations around the world, including India, to explore opportunities, listen to feedback, and work collaboratively. Along with our news partners, we see immense potential for AI tools like ChatGPT, including through search, to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience.”

“More broadly, we build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal precedents,” the spokesperson added.

On Friday, the Delhi High Court allowed the Federation of Indian Publishers, representing domestic and international book publishers operating in India, to intervene in the ANI case as well.

Books across several genres “are meticulously curated and crafted and are not commodities to be plundered at will”, the FIP said in a statement accompanying the intervention.