The government’s recommendation to make AI firms pay a portion of their earnings towards royalties to content creators — whose data the developers use to train AI models — will be linked to their global revenue, and not to what they earn in India, a senior official from the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), said Thursday.
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Earlier this week, a committee set up by the DPIIT released its working paper titled ‘One Nation, One License, One Payment: Balancing AI Innovation and Copyright’, which made sweeping recommendations for a new framework for AI training, including a mandatory blanket license requiring all AI companies to pay royalties for using copyrighted work to creators. It has also recommended the creation of a government-appointed panel to decide the royalty fee.
Simrat Kaur, Director at DPIIT, told reporters that the government-appointed committee can set a certain percentage of the global revenue earned by an AI developer from the commercialisation of the AI system trained on copyrighted content to calculate the royalty they would have to pay to copyright holders.
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In response to a question by The Indian Express on why the DPIIT committee has recommended a blanket licensing regime, which might take away copyright holders’ right and ability to negotiate payment terms with AI companies directly, Himani Pande, Additional Secretary, DPIIT, said, “This was one of the points that came up during the stakeholder consultations, that the right to negotiate is being taken away. But, in how many cases has there been a successful negotiation? Big players can still negotiate, but we wanted to create a mechanism for a larger body of creators who may not be able to monetise. This will essentially democratise that process”.
Pande added that the second part of the report will be released in the next two months, and will focus on whether works created using AI are eligible for copyright protections.
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The committee’s report comes amid growing skepticism of news publishers in several jurisdictions, including in the United States and India, over concerns of copyrighted material, such as news reports, being used by companies like OpenAI for training their foundational models, without permission or payment. Here, creators include musicians, news publishers, and authors.
This has led to court cases, including in India, where publishers — members of the DNPA, including The Indian Express, among others — have mounted a legal challenge against OpenAI over the “unlawful utilisation of copyrighted material”.
The report has also recommended that a new umbrella industry body, called the Copyright Royalties Collective for AI Training (CRCAT), will have to be set up by rights holders and be designated by the Central government under the Copyright Act, 1957. The CRCAT would serve as a centralised facilitator that streamlines collection of royalties for use of copyrighted content for training of AI systems, under a mandatory blanket license. Only organisations can be its members, and only one member per class of work would be allowed.
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