Digital
Why OpenAI is hiring 100 ex-bankers: Inside the ChatGPT-maker's secret project to automate Wall Street's grunt work
India’s AI Copyright Gamble: DPIIT’s hybrid licensing plan sparks battle over consent and fair pay
DPIIT’s proposal for a blanket licence allowing AI firms to train on all legally accessed content promises clarity for developers, but publishers, lawyers and policy experts warn it risks compulsory licensing, unfair payouts and a collapse of existing content economics.
A ‘One Nation, One Licence’ framework promises legal clarity for AI firms, but rights-holders warn it could erode consent, distort royalties and weaken India’s creative economy.
India’s draft framework for AI training has ignited one of the sharpest intellectual-property debates the country has seen in years, with the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) pushing a bold “One Nation, One Licence” model for generative AI systems. The white paper, which proposes a hybrid statutory licensing system allowing AI developers to use all “lawfully accessible” copyrighted content for training under a mandatory blanket licence, is being hailed as a long-overdue attempt to catch up with global AI policy.
But it has also triggered warnings of market distortion, forced participation and structural risks for India’s publishing, media and creative sectors.
The proposal attempts to strike a balance no one envies. India wants AI innovation to flourish, but it also wants creators to receive fair compensation for the intellectual property that powers these models. Under the current formulation, AI developers can train on any legally accessed content without consent, with royalties payable only when the resulting model or service is commercialised. The move promises legal certainty for developers and a predictable pathway for startups looking to build competitive models without navigating thousands of bilateral licences.
But the industry’s reaction has been split down the middle.
A framework that promises clarity and chaos in equal measure
Rishi Agrawal, CEO and Co-founder of TeamLease RegTech, says the draft recognises a basic truth that has been ignored for years: creators deserve to be paid.
“The paper finally acknowledges that input creators deserve compensation when their work is used to train AI systems,” he says, comparing the moment to the music industry’s shift from MP3 chaos to structured monetisation through platforms in the 2000s. He believes a single national licence could dramatically reduce friction, level the playing field for startups, and shore up India’s strategic position by treating Indian datasets as critical national assets.
But Agrawal also flags serious shortcomings. The paper’s biggest fault line is consent.
“Publishers and creators cannot opt out. That is a departure from global norms like the EU’s TDM opt-out,” he notes.
There are additional concerns around government-determined royalty rates, the possibility of large publishers crowding out smaller ones, and the broad classification of all ‘lawfully accessible’ content as trainable material. If the regime isn’t calibrated well, he says, the result could be a spike in paywalls and restricted access that shrinks India’s open-information ecosystem.
Legal community sees a compulsory regime in the making
Lawyers, too, are blunt in their assessment.
Ashwini Kumar, Advocate and Founder of My Legal Expert (MLE), says the system brings welcome legal certainty but simultaneously “forces creators to give up the power to refuse their works for training.” The proposed model mirrors music-industry licensing frameworks but does so without the market-tested safeguards that evolved over decades.
The biggest risks, he argues, lie in royalty-setting and valuation: “Rates decided by the government might not correlate with real market value, creating issues of fairness and transparency.”
For publishers, Kumar sees gaps everywhere: no clear consent or opt-out rights, vulnerability to AI-generated substitutes, and shaky protections for smaller creators in the royalty-distribution process. The fear is that if compulsory licensing becomes the norm, voluntary licensing markets may wither, and with them, the incentive structure that underpins creative production.
Sonam Chandwani, Partner at KS Legal, echoes this, warning that India may be carving out a compulsory licensing regime “without detailing how royalty rates will be determined, how datasets can be audited, or how provenance checks will work.” Without addressing these, she argues, the system might collide with international copyright norms and fail to protect publishers from substitution risks.
Policy experts point to severe operational landmines
Some of the sharpest critiques concern implementation.
Rohit Kumar, Founding Partner at The Quantum Hub, says the framework underestimates the complexity of revenue attribution in modern AI businesses. “Determining revenue for royalty payments is far from straightforward, particularly for global companies where Indian content contributes marginally to a global model,” he says.
Government-led rate-setting, he warns, can lead to price distortion and chronic underinvestment, drawing a parallel to legacy fare-setting challenges in public sectors like railways.
He also flags perhaps the thorniest issue: access itself.
Even if legally accessible content is trainable, large publishers could still block datasets behind paywalls, forcing developers to pay for access before they even pay royalties. And in cases where models are embedded within larger software suites, isolating model-specific revenue could be close to impossible.
Technical concerns collide with creator rights
From the AI industry’s vantage point, the proposal reduces friction but raises new hazards.
Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni, CTO of AIEnsured, says the framework creates a smoother runway for AI development by introducing royalties only at commercialisation and simplifying compliance into a single national licence. But he admits the concerns of creators are valid: “The lack of opt-out options, potential royalty bias toward larger catalogues, and ambiguity around global overlaps could create complications.”
Smaller firms could face heavier compliance than anticipated, and publishers may not be able to verify how their content was used.
Publishers fear loss of control and a skewed royalty economy
Across the board, publishers appear to be the most vulnerable group in this emerging regime. The framework opens the door to a new revenue stream, but the optimism stops there. They cannot control which works get used; high-value and time-sensitive content could be absorbed into training datasets without their consent, eroding subscription and exclusivity value.
Smaller publishers, especially in regional markets, risk being overshadowed by national giants in the royalty pool unless sector-wise allocation rules are created. The fear of uncontrolled access could push many towards stricter paywalls, reducing public access to credible information. And unless enforced rigorously, foreign AI systems operating in India may simply ignore the regime without meaningful consequences.
The long list of gaps that must be filled
Nearly every expert points to the same structural holes:
- no statutory basis clarifying whether this is compulsory licensing
- no consent or opt-out pathways
- no transparent royalty-setting or auditing mechanism
- no sector-specific safeguards for news, academic publishing or specialised databases
- no clarity on valuation of editorial judgment or curated content
- no enforcement mechanism for foreign AI systems
- no dispute-resolution framework tailored for AI–copyright conflicts
The DPIIT has launched consultations across an unusually broad spectrum: government bodies, tech companies, startups, publishers, media associations, collective management organisations, IP scholars, civil-society groups and the public.
The question now is whether this diversity of voices will guide the committee toward a balanced system that genuinely harmonises innovation with creator rights, or whether India risks locking itself into a compulsory, government-mediated regime that pleases no one.
For now, the paper is a start. But for the content economy that powers India’s digital future, the real work begins in the fine print.
“Two drunks leaning on a lamppost”: Sir Martin Sorrell on the Omnicom–IPG merger and the turbulence ahead
In a wide-ranging interview with Storyboard18, Sorrell delivers his frankest assessment yet of how the deal will redefine creativity, media, and talent across markets.