No copyright breach by ChatGPT in ANI case, Amicus Ramanujan tells Delhi HC

New Delhi: In a significant development, amicus curiae, Adarsh Ramanujan, in the submission filed at the Delhi High Court, argued that there is no infringement by OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, as alleged by Indian News Agency ANI (Asian News International). 

Calling it a “non-expressive” use, Ramanujan argued that the LLM predicts language patterns and does not reproduce exact content on various publisher platforms. “The way the model works is it only works on numbers. Every expression or data set provided to the program is broken down into individual tokens,” the amicus added. 

In its report, amicus Ramanujan stated that the model is trained in a way where the purpose is to verify if it can predict correctly, and the only way to decide whether it predicts correctly is to compare it to the original data. “There is no reproduction of the original data during the training loop,” Ramanujan said. 

During the reviewing of the report submitted by the amicus in the Delhi HC, Ramanujan said, “If the plaintiff is able to establish that the output contains extract of the read expressive part of the news article, then infringement will be made out.” 

The argument is currently focused on ‘fair use,’ while the amicus said that ‘fair dealing’ as per the Indian copyright law is to be checked instead. 

A separate report, submitted by amicus curiae Arul George Scaria, informed the Delhi HC that it has jurisdiction to hear the copyright infringement suit filed by ANI against OpenAI. Steering the hearing towards the point of territorial jurisdiction, Ramanujan argued that the plaintiff cannot be forced to go to a foreign court only because the infringing activity is being carried out outside India. 

“If he has a right under Indian law, he must have a remedy under Indian law. If he goes to the foreign court that foreign court will not have jurisdiction over Indian copyright,” the amicus noted.

Following the amicus’ submissions, ANI argued that the author of the work “should be the first owner of the copyright, provided that in the case of a literary, dramatic or artistic work made by the author in the course of his employment, or by the proprietor of a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical, because this is cited by them under a contract of service or apprenticeship for the purpose of publication.” 

The court has ordered the next hearing to commence on March 20.