India’s Minister for Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Ashwini Vaishnaw, has stated that the government will soon draft a new artificial intelligence law to safeguard the rights of news publishers and content creators while addressing user harms.
The minister said in an interview with the Economic Times that either the government may create new laws on its own or that the new requirements would be included in the Digital India Bill, which will take the place of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The Minister emphasized the significance of safeguarding the industry’s financial and commercial interests in addition to intellectual property.
One idea is to develop a body that can regulate itself.However, we don’t believe it would be sufficient. We believe that the legislative process should be used to enact this legislation. The industry has previously been consulted. We’ll start a formal consultation process after the elections and work toward legislation,” the Minister continued, according to the newspaper.
News organizations want copyright defense against AI that generates content:
In light of the growing usage of generative AI for content generation, Indian news organizations have also started to mobilize for copyright rights at the same time as the Minister’s speech. At least 17 Indian digital media organizations are represented by the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), which wrote to the Central Government in January of this year to request copyright protection regulations against generative AI models.
According to reports, the organization pushed for modifications to India’s platform-governing Information Technology Rules 2021 in letters to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) and MeitY. The organizations’ main goal is to guarantee just compensation for the usage of their journalistic material in AI model training.
The government highlights Indian publishers’ rights: At the DNPA Conclave in February, State Minister of IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar noted that the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for content scraping raises significant existential issues. Regardless of whether their work is paywalled or not, Chandrasekhar believed that content creators should always be entitled to any profits made from the monetization of their work.
According to the MoS, the government has not yet talked about how these content creators’ rights might be legally safeguarded. He added that a landmark case pertaining to the rights of digital news platforms and content creators for public consumption would be the ongoing legal dispute between OpenAI and the New York Times on content scraping.
Anurag Thakur, Minister of Information and Broadcasting, also addressed news publishers’ concerns about revenue loss to Big Tech corporations during the same meeting. The Minister announced that policy changes pertaining to digital marketing and digital advertising will soon be implemented by the government. He also emphasized that the government will support the industry with future policy interventions and will handle issues that are outside the purview of publishers.
