Major Indian Media Outlets In Bid To Join Lawsuit Against OpenAI

𓂃Indian media outlets including NDTV, The Indian Express, and Hindustan Times have requested a New Delhi court to let them join an ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI alleging copyright infringement. The Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), which represents leading TV and print organisations, claims OpenAI has been using data from their websites without permission, “scraping” content to train its AI models like ChatGPT.

💞Their concerns echo those of local news agency ANI, which first initiated legal action last year. Indian and global book publishers have also joined this legal challenge citing similar concerns.

💦However, according to Reuters, OpenAI lawyer Amit Sibal said he would oppose the bid by media organisations to join the case.

🎐This lawsuit is part of a larger global trend of legal actions against OpenAI accused of using copyrighted material to train AI tools without permission or compensation. 

Last year, The New York Times sued♌ OpenAI and Microsoft for using its articles to train GPT models without authorisation. 

ꦿIn its lawsuit, The New York Times claimed that ChatGPT, when prompted by users, occasionally reproduced sections of its articles word-for-word or shared significant parts of its content including investigative findings by Times reporters.

In Canada, major news outlets including The Canadian Press, Torstar, Globe and Mail, Postmedia and CBC/Radio-Canada, have in damages for similar reasons.

ไ“News media companies welcome technological innovations. However, all participants must follow the law, and any use of intellectual property must be on fair terms,” their joint statement read.

Authors, too, have taken legal action. The Authors Guild in the US, including writers like George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and John Grisham, filed a class-action lawsuit ﷽against OpenAI in New York, accusing it of using their works of fiction without consent. 

𓃲American comedian and actress Sarah Silverman has also filed a lawsuit, alleging OpenAI used her memoir ‘The Bedwetter’. Silverman claims her book might have been sourced from shadow libraries of pirated content, violating copyright law. She said that when asked about her memoir, ChatGPT provided a detailed summary of each section of the book.

✤These lawsuits come as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offers a “Copyright Shield” for its business clients, pledging to cover legal costs for users of ChatGPT Enterprise and its API who face copyright infringement claims. However, this protection does not extend to free-tier users, raising questions about OpenAI’s broader accountability.

ꦆOpenAI has in the past stated that its models are trained using publicly available data. They claimed that this approach follows fair use and international copyright principles, which they believe are fair to creators and also helps support innovation.

ꦦAmid ongoing allegations and lawsuits, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously stated that instead of removing copyrighted material from ChatGPT's training dataset, the company could cover legal costs for its clients facing copyright infringement claims.