In a quiet but consequential move, India has formed an expert panel to examine whether its aging copyright laws can hold their own against the disruptive force of artificial intelligence—a response triggered by mounting legal pressure against OpenAI.
At the heart of the storm is a lawsuit in Delhi’s high court, where some of the country’s most influential media houses and book publishers are accusing OpenAI of lifting their content without consent to train ChatGPT. The case could redefine the rules of engagement between creators and tech giants in India.
OpenAI has denied any breach, insisting that its training methods involve public data and comply with Indian law. It also points out that websites can opt out if they don’t want their content scraped.
Behind closed doors, however, India’s commerce ministry has been quietly rethinking the rules. A confidential government memo reveals that an eight-member panel of intellectual property lawyers, bureaucrats, and industry representatives was assembled last month to tackle what the memo calls “legal and policy issues arising from the use of artificial intelligence in the context of copyright.”
The panel is now tasked with evaluating whether the decades-old Copyright Act of 1957 is still fit for purpose—and, if not, recommending updates.
While officials have stayed tight-lipped, the backdrop is impossible to ignore. India’s newsrooms, represented by a coalition that includes NDTV, Indian Express, Hindustan Times, and the Digital News Publishers Association, are growing increasingly uneasy about what they see as digital trespassing in the name of progress.
India isn’t alone in facing these questions. Courts in the U.S. and Europe are also weighing whether AI companies can freely train on content generated by humans—authors, musicians, journalists—without paying for it.
The battle over copyright in the AI age has officially arrived in India. And it’s just getting started.
