Interim In Name, Final In Effect: A Critique Of The Delhi High Court’s Order In ANI Media V. OpenAI
- IJLLR Journal
- 3 days ago
- 1 min read
Mr. Navneet Krishna, Faculty, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow
ABSTRACT
On 24 July 2026, the Delhi High Court refused Asian News International’s application for an interim injunction against OpenAI, holding at a prima facie stage that the use of ANI’s copyrighted news content to train the large language models underlying ChatGPT falls within the fair dealing exception in Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957. Celebrated in some quarters as a victory for innovation, the 135-page order is, on closer examination, a case study in procedural overreach and interpretive strain. This essay argues that the Court resolved contested questions of fact without the benefit of trial, misapplied the statutory concept of an “infringing copy,” stretched the “private use” and “research” limbs of Section 52(1)(a) beyond their ordinary meaning through the misuse of the doctrine of updating construction, applied a fairness test that ignored the phenomenon of market dilution recognised in contemporaneous American jurisprudence, and constructed a text-and-data- mining opt-out regime that finds no basis in the statute. Read together, these features suggest that the order, however narrow its formal effect has already begun to perform the work of legislation.
Keywords: Fair dealing; Copyright Act, 1957; artificial intelligence; large language models; text and data mining; ANI Media v. OpenAI.
