Top News

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

India recently released a draft proposal requiring artificial intelligence companies to pay royalties when they use copyrighted work from the country to train their models. If enacted, the law could reshape how Meta, Google, OpenAI, and other big tech firms operate in one of their biggest markets.

With the world’s largest population, India has leverage that few other countries have. It is the second-biggest market for OpenAI’s ChatGPT after the US. It is one of the fastest-growing markets for Perplexity’s AI search engine, and the largest user base for WhatsApp and Facebook, where Meta is rolling out its AI tools. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon recently announced some $67 billion in AI infrastructure investments in the country.

India is therefore justified in demanding payment for its copyrighted data. Tech companies “will have to fit those payments into their deployment models – or give up this massive, lucrative market, and all of the scale advantages that being part of it confers,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, told Rest of World.

India’s linguistic diversity is another reason why AI companies need to treat the country differently, Grimmelmann said. The government is keen to develop multilingual...

Read more