Top media houses join lawsuit against OpenAI

DNPA AND THE PUBLISHERS SAID THAT COMPANIES SUCH AS OPENAI VIOLATE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS WHEN THEY USE THEIR CONTENT AND INFORMATION WITHOUT LICENCES

- Aditi Agrawal

NEW DELHI: The digital arms of three major news publishers — HT Digital Streams (HT Media), IE Online Media Services Private Limited (Express Group), and NDTV Convergence — along with industry body Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) on Monday filed an intervention application in the Delhi high court in news agency ANI's copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.

They sought to be heard as the jurisprudence set by the case will have an impact on how news is collected and disseminated.

The intervention application was filed a day before the next hearing in the case. DNPA and the publishers submitted that companies such as OpenAI violate intellectual property rights when they use their content and information on their websites and other platforms without licences, authorisation, or permissions.

The application noted that OpenAI has licensing deals with international news publishers such as Associated Press, The Atlantic, and News Corp, to access their content to train OpenAI's models and to use it in their outputs. It said that this is a "clear admission" that OpenAI needs licenses or permissions to use the content to train AI models. By failing to enter such deals with Indian publishers, OpenAI's "conduct in India betrays an inexplicable defiance of law and reveals their dishonest intentions".

DNPA said it has been trying to address the challenges Big Tech platforms, particularly search engines, social media platforms, and web scraping services, posed. It said that such entities often monetise news content without having any proper revenue sharing arrangement.