AI training royalties: India considers a compulsory licensing model for data mining

A Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) working group recently proposed that artificial-intelligence developers pay royalties whenever copyrighted Indian content is used for training models.

- ‘TDG NETWORK

The plan envisages a central fund (tentatively the Copyright Royalties Collective for AI Training (CRCAT)) that would collect payments and distribute themamong authors, publishers and other rights holders. Industry bodies have been invited to respond within 30 days, and the proposal could form the basis of amendments to the Copyright Act.

The proposal - According to a Reuters report, the panel recommended a blanket licence that gives AI firms automatic access to copyrighted works in exchange for a royalty, bypassing transaction-heavy individual licences. Another report notes that the CRCAT would beadminis-tered by a government-appointed committee, with royalty rates set as a percentage of an AI system's global revenue and reviewed every three years. Importantly, the royalties would apply retroactively to models already trained on copyrighted material, a provision that has alarmed technology companies.