Navigating Copyright Issues in Data Mining

The name "TDM" was first used by Marti A. Hearst in 1999. The first step in building an AI model is gathering training data, also known as TDM. It entails gathering large amounts of digital information in a methodical way and then using software to evaluate and extract useful information from this collection. Web scraping, crawling, and archiving are all part of this process. "New technologies that enable the automated computational analysis of information in digital form, such as text, sounds, images or data," is how the EU Directive on Copyright defines TDM. A new body of knowledge and emerging trends can be uncovered through the processing of massive amounts of data made feasible by TDMs, as per the EU Directive. This post focuses on TDM applied for training AI models, while TDM finds applicability in various non-AI domains as well. Rapid technological advancements, such as artificial intelligence and generative AI, are posing a threat to human creativity. After discovering what it believed to be copyright infringement in December 2023, the New York Times took legal action by suing Open AI and Microsoft in the US. The New York Times' main argument is that chatbots trained with millions of its articles are now competing with it. This lawsuit is just one of many that have been filed by various authors and artists who allege copyright infringement by Open AI. Japan, Singapore, and the European Union have made limited exceptions to their copyright rules to allow text and data mining, but the US legislation on using in-copyright works in training data is still evolving. Nearer to home, an important question arises: how can India's copyright law strike a compromise between protecting copyright works and facilitating AI and machine learning? The government of India (GOI) is confident that copyright rules adequately handle concerns about AI-generated works and related advancements, according to a recent press statement. This analytical write up focus on the legal framework of India applicable on text and data mining and its effectiveness to deal with current legal challenges posed by the generative AI.