Madras High Court Protects Travel Content from AI Scraping
India's Madras High Court has issued an interim order protecting copyrighted travel content from web scraping used to train artificial intelligence.
The Madras High Court has ruled that the unauthorized use of proprietary travel content as training data or prompts for artificial intelligence models and web scrapers constitutes a prima facie case of copyright infringement.
The case involved Keshan Infotech Pvt Ltd, which operates travelandtourworld.com. The company accused Oliver Brandt, an Italian editor, of systematically scraping its copyrighted travel content and republishing it on Google-owned social media platforms, retaining its logo while obscuring original authorship.
The court granted four injunctions. These included a restraint against reproducing or adapting the content through "any AI-assisted or algorithmic process" and a prohibition on using the content as input or training data for any AI model or automated content generation tool.
Justice K. Kumaresh Babu found that the plaintiff, a travel vlogger producing original content, had substantiated their claims. The court granted an ad interim injunction in favor of the plaintiff for four weeks.
This ruling reignites debate on whether training AI models on copyrighted material without permission infringes copyright under Indian law, or if such use falls under "fair dealing" provisions. This issue is central to ongoing discussions, such as the ANI vs. OpenAI case.