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Delhi High Court Ruling Puts AI Training Under Fair Dealing Test
The Delhi High Court’s ruling in ANI v. OpenAI is being viewed as India’s first major judicial pronouncement on copyright and artificial intelligence. The court held, on a prima facie and interim…
The Story in Brief
The Delhi High Court’s ruling in ANI v. OpenAI is being viewed as India’s first major judicial pronouncement on copyright and artificial intelligence. The court held, on a prima facie and interim basis, that OpenAI’s large-scale training could fall within Section 52(1)(a)(i) of the Copyright Act, which covers private or personal use, including research. It also rejected the view that commercial entities are automatically barred from using this defence.
Legal experts remain divided. Ankit Sahni said the ruling effectively created a broad text-and-data-mining exception not expressly found in the law and called for legislation. Deepank Singhal described the order as fact-specific, saying the dispute centred on retrieval-augmented generation rather than training itself. Critics, including Arjit Benjamin, said applying a personal-use exception to a global subscription business stretches the statute.
The Indian Opinion
The loudest claims are that the court has either cleared all AI training or handed publishers a complete victory. Neither follows from an interim, prima facie order. The harder issue is whether private research can cover industrial training by a paid global platform, and whether generated outputs reproduce protected reporting. Parliament may need clearer text, but a rushed blanket exception could also weaken licensing markets. The eventual test should examine the final ruling, the outputs, and evidence of market harm.
Source: legal.economictimes.indiatimes.com
This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
