It seems that Indian Digital news units, including those associated with billionaires Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, are raising concerns about OpenAI’s use of copyrighted content, legal papers show.
Indian Media Joining Legal Proceedings Against OpenAI
These outlets are reportedly joining legal proceedings against OpenAI for allegedly using their content without permission.
So far, the Courts around the globe are hearing claims by authors, news organisations and musicians.
They are accusing the technology firms of using their copyrighted work to train their AI services that too without any permission or payment.
If we consider only India, it has more than 690 million smartphone users who are using cheap mobile data plans.
So, for OpenAI the population in the country creates a critical market.
The media outlets, including Adani’s NDTV, and Ambani’s Network18 have raised their concerns with a New Delhi court.
Basically, they want to join an ongoing lawsuit against the ChatGPT creator as they are worried that their news websites are being scraped to store and reproduce their work for users of the powerful AI tool.
This was first time done by Reuters as it reported the case filing by the news publishers, which escalates an ongoing legal battle against ChatGPT in India.
OpenAI Presents Danger to Valuable Copyrights
The local news agency ANI was first to file a lawsuit against OpenAI last year, during this high-profile battle.
Besides this the Global and Indian book publishers have also joined the lawsuit.
They have created a 135-page case filing, which is not public but was reviewed by Reuters.
It argues OpenAI’s conduct constitutes “a clear and present danger to the valuable copyrights” of Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) members and other outlets.
Further, referring to OpenAI’s “wilful scraping and adaptation of content”, adding that “the disproportionate power of tech companies in prioritising content and extracting advertising revenue has raised concerns among publishers.”
This latest filing was made by the Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Adani’s NDTV and the DNPA.
It represents roughly 20 companies including Mukesh Ambani Network18 and players like Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar, Zee News, India Today Group and the Hindu.
As we know that most of these outlets have a flourishing newspaper and television news business too.
Interestingly, the Times of India is not part of the legal battle despite being a member of the DNPA as per the filing said without elaborating on the reasons.
On the request of comment, OpenAI reiterated an earlier statement that it was engaged in constructive partnerships with many news organisations, including in India.
In its defence, OpenAI was using publicly available data in a manner protected by fair use principles to build its AI models.
