Ambani, Adani-owned media, other digital outlets join copyright battle against ChatGPT creator OpenAI

Artificial intelligence company OpenAI faces a mounting legal challenge in India as several digital news entities have approached a New Delhi court to join an ongoing lawsuit against the ChatGPT creator over alleged copyright infringement, Reuters reported on Monday.

Digital news units owned by billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, along with other outlets like the Hindustan Times and Indian Express, told the court that they are worried OpenAI is scraping their news websites to train its AI model, according to the report.

The publishers, in a 135-page legal filing which Reuters said to have reviewed, allege that OpenAI’s practices pose “a clear and present danger to the valuable copyrights” of members of the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) and other media organisations. The filing reportedly accuses OpenAI of “wilful scraping” and “adaptation of content.”

The Times of India, a DNPA member, has not joined the lawsuit.

News agency ANI was the first to file a lawsuit against OpenAI last year, later joined in by global and Indian book publishers.

OpenAI and other generative AI firms are under scrutiny for using copyrighted content to train their systems.

OpenAI has denied such allegations in the past, asserting that its systems rely on publicly available data under fair-use principles.

In December, Italy’s data protection authority fined the company €15 million, accusing it of processing personal data without proper legal grounds and lacking transparency in its operations. OpenAI called the decision “disproportionate” and has vowed to appeal, while affirming its commitment to working with global privacy regulators.

In November, Canadian publishers including The Canadian Press and The Globe and Mail filed a lawsuit alleging OpenAI profited from their content without authorisation. Similar cases are ongoing in the US, including a lawsuit by The New York Times.