India has set up a panel to review if existing copyright law is sufficient to tackle AI-related disputes, an official memo showed, at a time when OpenAI faces legal challenges stemming from accusations of exploiting copyrighted material.

A case in the high court in New Delhi by a group of top Indian news outlets and book publishers who say the firm uses their content without permission to help train its ChatGPT chatbot could reshape how the sector operates in India, a Reuters report said yesterday, adding that the OpenAI has denied wrongdoing.

The memo, which is not public, said the Commerce Ministry set up a panel of eight experts last month to examine issues related to AI and their implications for India’s copyright law.

The experts have been tasked to “identify and analyze the legal and policy issues arising from the use of artificial intelligence in the context of copyright,” the memo added.

The panel of intellectual property lawyers, government officials and industry executives will also examine the adequacy of the Copyright Act of 1957 in resolving such concerns and make recommendations to the government, it said.

India’s commerce and infotech ministries did not respond to Reuters’ queries. The copyright law has been at the centre of the OpenAI lawsuits in India.

Billionaire Gautam Adani’s NDTV, along with the Indian Express and Hindustan Times newspapers and the Digital News Publishers Association, which groups top news outlets, say they share concerns over copyright law violations by AI platforms using their data to train such apps, the Reuters report stated.