AI copyright blueprint: pragmatism over rigidity

The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade’s (DPIIT) working paper on regulating use of copyrighted works in AI training comes at a time when the issue can no longer be deferred. Litigation around AI training has already surfaced in India and is well underway in other jurisdictions. Given that generative models depend on ingesting large volumes of copyrighted material, uncertainty around what constitutes lawful training use has become untenable. In that sense, the proposal for a mandatory blanket licence is not a speculative regulatory exercise but a response to a problem that has already emerged and is likely to intensify.