Delhi HC has jurisdiction to hear ChatGPT case, amicus curiae tells court

The Delhi High Court has the jurisdiction to hear the copyright infringement suit filed by Asian News International (ANI) against OpenAI Inc, the parent of ChatGPT, amicus curiae Arul George Scaria told the court on Friday.

 

Though the servers of ChatGPT are located outside India, they can be accessed from India. “It doesn’t matter where the servers are located… if they are accessed from Delhi (India)… so the court has jurisdiction (to hear the case),” Scaria told the court.

 

Amicus curiae (literal translation: ‘friend of the court’) refers to a person or organisation that offers information or advice to a court, even though they are not a party to the case.

 

As ChatGPT provides an “interactive service”, the service meets the criteria of jurisdiction under Section 20 of the Civil Procedure Code (CPC). Section 20 of CPC determines where a civil suit can be filed in India, based on the defendant's residence or the location of the cause of action. Among the issues to be considered by the court are the question of jurisdiction and whether the storage of ANI’s data would lead to copyright infringement, Scaria said.

 

There are two ways of using copyrighted material—expressive and non-expressive use, he said, adding that there is no copyright infringement in non-expressive use, and expressive use is also permitted in certain cases.

 

“There might be some expressive uses because the plaintiff has also shown examples where material might have 90 per cent similarity. It is not verbatim copied, but in some cases, there is similarity,” Scaria told the court.

 

Storing content by OpenAI, whether temporarily or permanently, is permitted and covered under copyright law if it is for the purpose of learning, he said, while also citing the fair use doctrine under Section 52 of the Copyright Act.

 

"The strength of an LLM depends on the extent of material available for training. The defendant is a big tech company, but what we might want to be worried about is that if a startup or small company wants to venture into this area, would it be technically and financially feasible for it to take a licence from all copyright owners?" Scaria opined.

 

A second amicus curiae, Adarsh Ramanujan, also appointed by the Delhi HC, made additional submissions in the matter. The submissions will continue on March 10.

 

The Delhi High Court is hearing the case moved by ANI Media against ChatGPT maker OpenAI, in which the former has alleged that its content was illegally used to train large language models (LLMs) and other artificial intelligence (AI) models. Apart from ANI, several other domestic news publishers and their representative associations, media houses, and music labels have sought to intervene in the case as petitioners.