Indian News Publishers Seek Rules To Protect Copyright Against GenAI

Amid rising AI copyright disputes across the globe, Indian news publishers are seeking amendments to the Information Technology rules to ensure fair compensation for the usage of their content in the training of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models.

The Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) has written to the ministries of electronics and information technology, and information and broadcasting, requesting safeguards against AI models causing copyright infringements in the digital news space.

“Now that we know the positive opportunity and impact of generative AI and its implications on content creators and publishers…there is an opportunity to ensure that any company or LLM (large language model) uses data in a fair and transparent way while compensating the sources from where it takes the content or data to train its models,” Sujata Gupta, secretary general of DNPA, said as quoted in the report.

Representing 17 leading media publishers in the country, DNPA is advocating for amendments to the Information Technology (IT) Rules. This move aims to address concerns until the enactment of the anticipated Digital India Act, which is poised to replace the 24-year-old IT Act of 2000 and regulate artificial intelligence.

Over the past three months, the association has engaged in ongoing discussions with the ministries to underscore industry concerns, according to Gupta. The emergence of Indian Language Models (LLMs) and their global counterparts poses challenges akin to those experienced by the New York Times, potentially impacting publishers’ business models, she added.

It is to be noted here that the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular AI platforms in December, citing “unlawful” use of copyrighted content.

Recently, Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal unveiled AI models of his new startup Krutrim AI and touted its solutions as “India’s first full-stack AI”. Ola Krutrim AI claims to have built its AI models from scratch, having trained them on 2 Tn tokens and unique datasets. The AI models can understand over 20 Indian languages and generate text in 10 Indian languages, including Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Marathi.

In December, Bengaluru-based gen AI startup Sarvam AI, raised Series A funding of $41 Mn (around INR 342 Cr) led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has built OpenHathi.

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