OpenAI has won a landmark legal victory in India. On July 24 local time, the Delhi High Court ruled that OpenAI's use of content from Asian International News Agency (ANI) to train its artificial intelligence model does not constitute copyright infringement. This ruling not only clears legal obstacles for OpenAI in India, but could also provide important judicial references for global copyright disputes over AI training data.

"Fair use" withstands the copyright crackdown, public interest overrides the injunction request

Judge Amit Bansal clearly stated in the judgment that OpenAI's actions fall under the "fair use" exception defined in India's Copyright Act. At the same time, ANI failed to submit sufficient evidence to the court proving direct copying of ANI's copyrighted content in ChatGPT's responses. These two core findings fundamentally undermine ANI's legal basis.

More notably, the judge carefully weighed the consequences of the injunction. The judgment emphasized that issuing any temporary injunction at this stage would be detrimental to the overall development of artificial intelligence, especially affecting large language model projects currently being developed in India. The judge further pointed out that if the injunction were implemented, it would have widespread negative impacts on the public interest - a large number of users in India who freely use ChatGPT would be the first to suffer. On the scale between technological innovation and copyright protection, the Delhi High Court clearly placed the weight on the former.

The timing of this ruling is rather delicate. Just as news publishers around the world are collectively pressuring AI companies to pay for training data, this ruling from the Indian court provides rare and strong legal support for the AI industry. Previously, media outlets such as The New York Times have filed similar lawsuits against OpenAI in the United States, and the case is still under review. Whether the ruling from the Delhi High Court will serve as a reference for judges in other jurisdictions will become an important signal to closely monitor in the global AI copyright dispute in the coming period.