News Agency ANI Sues OpenAI For Alleged Violation Of IP Rights

News agency ANI has reportedly sued ChatGPT creator OpenAI for allegedly using its original news content in an unauthorised manner.

As per HT, the suit is scheduled to be heard by justice Amit Bansal in the Delhi high court today (November 19), and ANI is set to be one of the first Indian publishers to file a case against an AI platform for violating its intellectual property rights.

The lawsuit has been filed by Delhi-based Unum Law on behalf of ANI, said the report.

The report highlighted that the suit claims OpenAI has exploited ANI’s content for its commercial gain in two means, where it uses ANI’s content to train its large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT producing ANI’s content verbatim in response to users’ queries.

Furthermore, the report said the suit goes on to allege that OpenAI accredited statements and news, which are not sourced to ANI and the news agency argues that such cases pose a threat to ANI’s reputation and can result in a possible circulation of fake news causing public disorder.

“We are actively engaged in constructive partnerships and conversations with many news organisations around the world, including India, to explore opportunities, listen to feedback, and work collaboratively,” a spokesperson from OpenAI told Inc42.

“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.

It is known that the San Francisco-based AI company has remained in the light of fighting legal battles with global firms for a while, where Starlink founder Elon Musk is one of the prominent figures that is currently pursuing OpenAI in a lawsuit in a federal court in Oakland, California.

As per the Guardian’s report from a few days ago, Elon Musk alleges that OpenAI and its biggest financial backer Microsoft have illegally sought to monopolise the market for generative artificial intelligence and sideline competitors.

Earlier this year, there were concerns arising about the misuse of GenAI in India.

In February, Google ran into trouble with the IT ministry in India over some of the responses of its LLM model Gemini on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

To keep a check on preventing such incidents, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) rolled out an advisory mandating digital platforms to seek prior approval before launching any AI product in India. However, the government rolled back the advisory after public outcry over the issue. 

According to the recent Inc42’s report on India’s Generative AI Startup Landscape, at least 59% of enterprise-scale organisations in India actively use GenAI to fuel their business growth.

Updated at 06:08 PM