Delhi HC – Indian Courts Can Test ght Infringement Claims Despite Foreign AI Server location
Judgment dated 24.7.2026 of the High Court of Delhi in IA No.45300 of 2024 in CS (COMM) 1028 of 2024 of ANI Media Pvt Ltd Vs. Open AI OPCO LLC
Whether ChatGPT’s responses are substantial reproduction of ANI’s copyrighted literary works?
Whether the Courts in India have jurisdiction to entertain the present law suit considering that the servers of the defendants are located in the United States of America
Open AI that its LLMs are trained outside India and the training data is stored and processed in the servers located in the United States of America (hereinafter ‘US’). On behalf of Open AI, it is contended that the Indian Copyright Act would not apply outside the territory of India.
Whether the use by the defendants of Plaintiff’s copyrighted data in order to generate responses for its users, would amount to infringement of the Plaintiff’s copyright.
Innovations affecting the works protected under the Copyright Act, 1957 (hereinafter the ‘Copyright Act’), namely literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, cinematograph films, and sound recordings, have consistently given rise to interpretive challenges in the application of traditional legal provisions.
Procuring publicly available data by AI innovators for training LLMs without the permission of the respective copyright holders potentially will raise legal issues, as arising in the present suit.
The present suit has been filed by the plaintiff (hereinafter ‘ANI’) against the defendant (hereinafter ‘Open AI’) alleging unauthorised use of ANI’s copyrighted works by Open AI. ANI claims copyright infringement on two counts:
- Training claim – copying and storage of ANI’s data to train Open AI’s LLM; and
- 7. Reproduction or Output claim – reproduction of ANI’s works in the output produced by Open AI’s LLM through its application ChatGPT.
