Bollywood labels join media publishers in OpenAI copyright battle

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India’s top Bollywood music labels, including T-Series, Saregama, and Sony Music, have moved to join a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI in a New Delhi court, citing concerns over the unauthorised use of sound recordings for AI training.

This development comes just a day after OpenAI declared in the Delhi HC that it didn’t use the data from the Indian media publishers to train ChatGPT.

The Indian Music Industry (IMI) and others filed an application on Thursday, emphasising that OpenAI’s alleged practices could impact not just the Indian music industry but the global entertainment sector, Reuters reports.

This could be true as last year, reports emerged that OpenAI scrapped over a million hours of YouTube videos to train ChatGPT.

The lawsuit, initially filed by news agency ANI last year, accused OpenAI of using copyrighted content without permission to train its AI models, particularly OpenAI models, particularly ChatGPT. OpenAI pleaded with the Delhi HC to dismiss the lawsuit.

Since then, major publishing houses and media groups, including those backed by Indian billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, have joined the case, escalating the legal battle against the US-based AI giant.

A source told Reuters that the music labels fear AI systems could undermine intellectual property rights by extracting copyrighted material to train generative AI models.

The music rights organisation GEMA in Germany filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI. OpenAI has previously defended itself against such allegations, stating that its AI models rely on publicly available data and adhere to fair-use principles.

In its defence against the ANI lawsuit, OpenAI argued that Indian courts lack jurisdiction over the company since it is based in the United States and operates its servers outside India. However, with Indian and world regulators increasingly focusing on AI governance and copyright protections, the outcome of this case may affect other cases.

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