IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: More overseas plaintiffs take aim at OpenAI, (Nov 20, 2024)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

A news organization in India and a music rights organization in Germany are the latest to take on the company behind ChatGPT.

OpenAI ’s ChatGPT has unlawfully harvested a South Asian news organization’s content to train its large language AI model and reproduces portions of that content in response to user queries, a new lawsuit in India claims. The lawsuit, filed in the highest court for the National Capital Territory of Delhi, comes on the heels of another copyright infringement lawsuit—this one aimed at the ChatGPT’s reproduction of music lyrics through its “chatbox” function—filed against OpenAI in Germany.

The Indian lawsuit was brought by Asian News International, a multimedia news agency with over 100 bureaus in India, South Asia and across the globe. According to Bar and Bench, a widely read Indian legal journal, the 287-page complaint alleges that the news organization’s content is being used to train ChatGPT to answer user queries and that the chatbot “reproduces ANI’s original content in its response to the users.” The widely-covered lawsuit has drawn frequent comparisons to the lawsuit now pending in a Manhattan federal court, brought by The New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI.

The lawsuit, filed in the Delhi High Court on Monday, has been on a fast track. At a publicly broadcast hearing on Tuesday, Justice Amit Bansal issued a summons to OpenAI and said he would appoint an amicus curiae to help it assess the case in light of “the range of issues involved in the present suit as well as the issues arising on account of latest technological advancements vis-a-vis copyrights of various copyright owners.” The court did not rule on the news organization’s motion for interim relief but, according to news reports, it did take note of the fact that OpenAI has now blocked the news organization’s content from its harvesting activities. According to Delhi High Court records, the next hearing on the case is scheduled for January 28, 2025.

The German lawsuit was filed in Munich by the German Society for Musical Performing and Mechanical Reproduction Rights (Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte, or GEMA for short). In an English-language press release and FAQ, the collecting society explains that the lawsuit takes aim at autogenerative chatbot systems operated by OpenAI. In short, the press release explains, GEMA accuses OpenAI of “reproducing protected song lyrics by German authors without having acquired licenses or paid the authors in question.” The lawsuit’s aim, GEMA explains, is “to prove that OpenAI systematically uses GEMA's repertoire to train its systems.”

The lawsuit is not the first to take on AI systems over chatbox and lyric reproduction issues. In this country, for example, music publishers have taken on Anthropic’s AI chatbox Claude in a Nashville federal court. However, the German lawsuit is the first in which a collective rights organization has sued the makers of an AI system—and it is seen as a test case for other similar actions. The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, known by its French-language acronym CISAC, has described the case as a “model action to clarify AI providers‘ remuneration obligations in Europe.” Other lawsuits—in Europe and elsewhere—are sure to follow.

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