ANI has approached the Delhi High Court against a single-judge decision that declined to grant it interim protection in its copyright infringement case against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

The appeal came up before a Division Bench led by Justice V Kameswar Rao on Tuesday. However, the Bench did not assemble. The matter will now be taken up on September 14. Justice Rao has recently been appointed Chief Justice of the Patna High Court.

ANI had sued OpenAI, alleging that its news reports and other original content were being used by the AI company for commercial purposes without permission. The news agency claimed that ChatGPT could reproduce its reports substantially verbatim when users sought information and, in some instances, attributed statements or news developments to ANI that, according to the agency, had never been published.

OpenAI had questioned the maintainability of the proceedings in India, pointing out that its AI models were not trained in India and that its servers are located in the United States. It also argued that the use of copyrighted material in machine learning constitutes a transformative process and that copyright protection does not extend to underlying news facts.

The company had further submitted that publishers who do not want their material accessed can seek to have their websites placed on a blocklist.

The single judge, while refusing ANI’s request for an interim injunction, had held that OpenAI’s storage of ANI’s copyrighted works did not, by itself, constitute infringement under the Copyright Act, 1957.

The court had also considered OpenAI’s research-related defence. It observed that training the large language models powering ChatGPT involves machine learning based on stored literary works, including processes of screening and organising such material.