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AI giant faces legal action in India on copyright issues

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OpenAI counts India as second biggest market

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Music labels latest to oppose OpenAI in India, after media

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OpenAI says its models trained on publicly available

content

By Aditya Kalra

NEW DELHI, Feb 14 (Reuters) - A group of India's top

Bollywood music labels, from T-Series to Saregama and Sony ( SONY ), is

seeking to join a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI in New Delhi,

highlighting worries about improper use of recordings to train

AI models, legal documents show.

Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed OpenAI's legal challenges are mounting

globally and in India, its second biggest market by users. But

the company says it follows fair-use principles in employing

publicly available data to build its AI models.

On Thursday, the Indian Music Industry (IMI) group, T-Series

and Saregama India asked a New Delhi court to hear

concerns about "unauthorised use of sound recordings" in

training AI models that breaches their copyright.

The companies' contentions in the lawsuit "are crucial for

the entire music industry in India, and even worldwide," they

said in their filing, which is not public but was reviewed by

Reuters.

OpenAI and the music labels did not respond to requests for

comments on Friday.

The music labels want to join a lawsuit launched last year

by Indian news agency ANI that accused OpenAI's ChatGPT

application of using its content without permission to train AI

models.

Since then, book publishers and media groups, some backed by

billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, have banded

together to oppose the company in the New Delhi court.

Bollywood and Hindi pop music are big business in India.

T-Series is one of India's largest music record labels which

releases about 2,000 sound records or songs annually, while

Saregama, more than 100 years old, owns a repertoire of famed

Indian singers such as Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar.

On its website, the IMI group says it also represents global

names such as Sony Music and Warner Music ( WMG ).

In India, the music labels are "concerned OpenAI and other

AI systems can extract lyrics, music compositions and sound

recordings from the internet," said an industry source who spoke

on condition of anonymity as the matter is in court.

The Indian companies' latest action comes after Germany's

GEMA, which represents composers, lyricists and publishers, said

in November it had sued OpenAI for ChatGPT's alleged unlicensed

reproduction of song lyrics with which "the system has obviously

been trained".

OpenAI, which is grappling with new challenges from Chinese

startup DeepSeek's breakthrough in cheap AI computing, opposed

the ANI lawsuit on the grounds that Indian courts lack

jurisdiction, as the company is U.S.-based, with servers abroad.

The next hearing in the lawsuit, which is seen as shaping

the future of how AI models use copyright content in India, is

set for Feb. 21.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman visited India last week, meeting the

infotech minister, and discussing the country's plan to pursue

low-cost AI.