Twenty months after ANI sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, Delhi High Court delivered a lengthy interim judgment, pending trial, in favour of the tech company. ANI had made two claims. One, that the San Francisco-based AI company was reproducing copyrighted content belonging to ANI, on its own servers, for the purposes of training its LLMs. Two, that OpenAI was reproducing and displaying its copyrighted content to its users, in response to their queries. OpenAI denied the allegations on both facts and law, including that it was protected under copyright law's fair-dealing doctrine.
The court ruled in favour of the tech biggie on all counts, despite conceding that there were several disputes of facts that could be decided only through a trial. Ideally, when facts are in dispute, the court should direct litigants to a trial. Instead, the court decided to form a prima facie opinion about the facts - basically, an informed guess on the outcome after a trial.
