Interests of content generators will be protected by proposed AI legislation, say experts

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One of the challenges facing the proposed artificial intelligence legislation (AI) is to protect the creative and commercial interest of content creators such as news publishers as well as those of the developers of generative AI (GenAI) models, legal experts have told The Economic Times. Their comments came against the backdrop of Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw telling the newspaper in the first week of April that such an AI law is being drafted by the government.

“Specific legislation on this issue will help India find the appropriate balance between enabling technology innovation (through AI) while valuing and protecting news reporting, and artistic innovation,” Arun Prabhu, partner and head – technology & telecommunication at law firm Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas told the newspaper.

Recently the New York Times moved court against OpenAI making headlines all over the world.

The government’s move to introduce the legislation in this fast-expanding domain has been dubbed by legal experts as “timely”. The quick proliferation of AI-generated content has the potential of considerably influencing and impacting the publishing industry. It has also triggered concerns of infringements of copyrights.

In keeping with the characteristics of the cyberworld, news and content generated by AI-driven companies poses significant challenges in a borderless world and the Indian legislation could tackle contentious issues such as “fair use”, whether AI-driven platforms can go around paywalls, attribution and how direct and indirect commercial benefits could be shared.

The Union IT minister had said earlier that the government is preparing the Bill in a way that would facilitate securing the rights and share of proceeds between news publishers, content generators and AI-driven technology entities while fostering a climate of innovation.

Vaishnaw had also said that it could form a standalone piece of legislation or be subsumed as a part of the DigitalIndia Bill that is supposed to replace the IT Act that was introduced in 2000.

“The interface of generative AI models with copyright law is a recent phenomenon and Indian jurisprudence has not evolved sufficiently to address the issue,” partner at IndusLaw, Ranjana Adhikari, told the newspaper. Adhikari said that globally many publishers, some of them prominent, have gone to court specifically on this issue. The case between New York Times against OpenAI is one such high-profile instance.

Incidentally, the recently legislated EU AI Act requires AI models to comply with EU copyright law apart from publishing detailed summaries of the content used for training.

“In my view, any future Indian law (whether as a part of the Digital India Bill or a standalone statute), which attempts to safeguard the IP and commercial interest of publishers in the age of AI, will have to be preceded by an extensive exercise which firstly identifies the various ways in which AI models use existing copyrighted material for their training and secondly analyses how much of such use legitimately falls within the domain of infringement,” Adhikari added.