The Delhi High Court’s interim order in ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. OpenAI OPCO LLC (2026) refusing injunctive relief, may be a precursor to recasting India’s copyright laws and interpreting existing laws in light of evolving technologies, to ensure transparency and effective balancing of owner rights with that of public interest. Further appeals and developments on this order are inevitable.

This, being an interim order, does not decide rights of all large language models (LLMs), but its impact in evaluating the legality of usage of copyright-protected content in training and reproductions by LLMs cannot be disputed. This being an interim order, it would be premature for LLM developers to rejoice or assume unfettered usage of publicly available data. For the public, sans technicalities, the relevance lies in continued availability of technology-enabled conveniences. For the copyright owners, this is a wake-up call to strengthen their rights through statutory upgrades and use of technology to protect their publicly shared proprietary content.

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A copyright owner’s rights over proprietary content restrict third parties from reproducing and communicating to public such content without consent of the owners. Section 14 of the Copyright Act, 1957 (the Act) explicitly restrains “storing” of such data without owner consent. The question of LLMs being trained using copyright protected content scraped from the web, without consent of the owner of such data, cuts to........

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