NEW DELHI — A Division Bench of the Delhi High Court comprising Justices Avneesh Jhingan and Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora has issued notice to OpenAI regarding an appeal filed by news agency Asian News International (ANI).
The appeal challenges a July 24 single-judge order that held the unauthorized use of copyrighted media content for training Large Language Models (LLMs) could fall under the “fair dealing” exception of Indian copyright law. The Bench declined immediate interim relief to ANI, scheduling the next hearing for December 8, 2026.
Core Legal Issue & Case Background
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Single-Judge Order Contested: ANI is challenging an order by Justice Amit Bansal, which held that OpenAI’s storage and use of ANI’s news content for LLM training prima facie qualified as “private or personal use, including research” under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957.
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Appellant’s Position: ANI argues that the single-judge ruling improperly expands commercial fair-dealing exceptions, asserting that publicly available content does not confer the right to copy, store, and commercially exploit proprietary journalism.
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Industry Significance: Initiated in 2024 as the first AI copyright lawsuit by an Indian news organization, the case has drawn intervention from the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) and is expected to set a key legal precedent for generative AI training frameworks in India.
