India stands at a consequential second in shaping the connection between copyright and synthetic intelligence. The Division for Promotion of Trade and Inside Commerce (DPIIT), below India’s Ministry of Commerce and Trade, formulates and implements insurance policies to advertise industrial progress, innovation, and funding. It oversees mental property coverage, startup and know-how initiatives, and regulatory frameworks shaping India’s enterprise atmosphere, together with rising points equivalent to synthetic intelligence and digital commerce. DPIIT organized a superb committee of specialists to evaluation and assess the unreal intelligence authorized panorama principally as utilized to copyright. That committee produced a “Working Paper” entitled “ONE NATION ONE LICENSE ONE PAYMENT: Balancing AI Innovation and Copyright” which type of tells you all that you must learn about the place that paper is heading proper from the leap.
The DPIIT Working Paper proposes a “Hybrid Mannequin” obligatory license for AI coaching meant to supply authorized certainty and speed up technological improvement in India. However velocity, if it outruns information and safeguards, can produce instability somewhat than readability.
To their credit score, DPIIT put the Working Paper up for public remark. The Artist Rights Institute (ARI) and Abby North filed a remark and urged a extra measured method grounded in transparency, verifiable lawful entry, and safety of creator and id rights.
How We Obtained Right here
The proposal didn’t emerge in isolation. It arose contemporaneously with main world and home litigation analyzing how generative AI programs are skilled—together with the continuing ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. OpenAI proceedings earlier than the Delhi Excessive Court docket. Courts worldwide are nonetheless creating the factual document regarding dataset development, lawful entry, and artificial outputs.
ARI cautioned that legislating whereas these information stay below energetic judicial examination dangers embedding assumptions which will later show incorrect—notably relating to how coaching supplies are literally obtained and used.
Frontier Labs Are Not Distant Observers
Main frontier AI corporations keep engineering, analysis, coverage, and industrial operations in India and have recruited extensively from Indian technical communities. That is typical of multinational know-how corporations, nevertheless it underscores a structural actuality: the entities most affected by the proposed framework are additionally deeply embedded within the ecosystems shaping it.
ARI subsequently emphasised the necessity for transparency, impartial governance, and enforceable compliance—so the system operates pretty no matter institutional scale or affect.
Velocity vs. Proof
The Working Paper means that awaiting the end result of AI litigation could also be pointless. ARI respectfully disagreed. Litigation just isn’t merely delay—it’s how information are uncovered. Current instances have revealed by discovery and cross-examination that coaching datasets typically included unauthorized or pirated supplies—information unlikely to floor in any other case.
There’s additionally a structural concern. The one lifelike means a legislative course of may transfer sooner than advanced litigation is that if deliberation is proscribed and the statute is designed—deliberately or not—to settle or preempt disputes earlier than the factual document is full. A blanket license that substitutes administrative fee for adjudication can have the sensible impact of chopping off future litigation over how fashions have been truly skilled.
We now have seen this dynamic earlier than. The U.S. Music Modernization Act’s blanket mechanical license resolved structural points but in addition obscured unresolved liabilities that took years to floor. There have been no significant legislative hearings, and what little consideration Congress gave the laws appeared principally directed at the right way to implement the legal guidelines that the lobbyists had drafted for purchasers who may afford them. Velocity truly delivered uncertainty as we now can see.
When legislative shortcuts substitute fact-finding, the result’s typically not readability however a chronic cleanup. That could possibly be disastrous within the case of a obligatory license, particularly for AI which is already a catastrophe for artists.
The “Lawfully Accessible” Drawback: A statutory license can not rely upon a situation that can not be examined.
The Working Paper acknowledges that frontier AI programs have incessantly relied on unauthorized or pirated supplies. That admission raises a elementary query: how can a statutory license conditioned on “lawfully accessible” works operate if lawful entry can’t be verified?
ARI urged DPIIT to outline “lawfully accessible” operationally and to require verifiable provenance, auditable recordkeeping, and enforceable compliance earlier than licensing. Critically, ARI really useful that the burden of proof relaxation on the developer—a celebration looking for the advantage of a blanket license should show, prematurely, that its coaching corpus was lawfully obtained earlier than counting on the proposed obligatory license. With out this allocation of burden, the lawful-access predicate dangers changing into aspirational somewhat than actual.
Transparency and the Metadata Actuality
A obligatory regime can operate provided that supported by verifiable transparency and traceability. ARI highlighted a elementary technical barrier: there isn’t any complete AI metadata normal, and real-world ingestion practices incessantly strip or fail to protect identifiers equivalent to ISBN, ISRC, and ISWC.
As demonstrated within the Bartz litigation—now headed towards settlement funds by Anthropic—coaching datasets typically lacked persistent work-level metadata, complicating attribution and compensation. ARI urged DPIIT to deal with transparency as an engineering requirement: dataset disclosure, standardized recordkeeping, persistent identifiers the place possible, and impartial audit rights should be embedded from the outset. With out traceability, statutory remuneration dangers changing into theoretical somewhat than enforceable.
Character and Identification: The Lacking Piece
The proposal doesn’t absolutely handle the rising physique of Indian litigation regarding voice, likeness, and id—points more and more implicated by generative AI. Whereas India lacks a statutory proper of publicity within the U.S. sense, courts have reached comparable protections by passing off, privateness, and persona rights doctrines. Current Bollywood litigation displays judicial recognition that unauthorized artificial replication may cause actual hurt.
ARI urged DPIIT to make sure that obligatory entry to copyrighted works doesn’t authorize misappropriation of persona and that id protections—together with autopsy pursuits—are explicitly preserved.
The Boomerang Danger
A broad statutory license can create unintended penalties. Underneath nationwide therapy ideas, even a impartial regime should not disproportionately burden international works in apply—and any statutory charge utilized to international works will even apply to Indian works utilized in India. If set too broadly or too low, the regime could compress the worth of India’s personal artistic sectors.
Furthermore, the framework should fulfill the Berne/TRIPS three-step take a look at. If perceived as overbroad, it may invite worldwide scrutiny—together with WTO dispute decision. In that sense, a coverage designed to speed up home technological improvement could boomerang on India, creating strain on India’s personal artistic financial system and regulatory stability.
What DPIIT Ought to Do Now
Primarily based on ARI’s submission, a number of sensible steps would materially strengthen the framework:
- Outline “lawfully accessible” operationally and require builders to show lawful entry earlier than qualifying for any statutory license.
- Embed transparency as infrastructure, together with dataset disclosure, standardized recordkeeping, persistent worldwide identifiers the place acknowledged, and impartial audit rights.
- Defend persona and performer rights explicitly, making certain that obligatory entry doesn’t legitimize unauthorized artificial replication of voice, likeness, or persona, together with autopsy pursuits.
- Make clear territorial scope and stop regulatory arbitrage, together with mechanisms for cross-border royalty identification and distribution.
- Guarantee treaty compatibility upfront, together with cautious calibration below the Berne/TRIPS three-step take a look at and nationwide therapy ideas.
- Create actual enforcement mechanisms, together with verification, audit triggers, suspension, and revocation for non-compliance.
Taken collectively, these measures would assist make sure that innovation proceeds on a basis of lawful entry, transparency, and sustainable artistic incentives.
The Actual Selection
India has a possibility to craft a framework that helps innovation whereas sustaining the artistic ecosystem that fuels it. Velocity may be precious. However when coverage outruns information, the result’s not often certainty.
We now have seen this film earlier than—and it often ends in a multitude.
