Hyderabad, Feb 03: SFLC.in along with VISWAM.ai, FOSS United, and The Linux Foundation, hosted an official India AI Impact Pre-Summit event that brought together policymakers, technologists, journalists, civil society and industry voices. The event was inaugurated by Prof. Sandeep Shukla, Director of International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad).
As part of the consultation, we held two closed-door roundtable discussions on Trust, Safety, and Accountability in AI:
1. Harnessing Open Source AI: exploring openness, transparency, safety, licensing, and governance in AI systems.
2. Balancing AI Innovation and Copyright: Examining the DPIIT Working Paper on Generative AI and Copyright, including proposed licensing models and their implications for creators and developers.
Across both the roundtables, the participants emphasised that India’s AI future should be focused on openness, accountability and inclusive access. The First roundtable concluded that AI education and skilling initiatives must be grounded in open-source frameworks rather than closed, vendor-controlled models. The principle of ‘public money, public good’ featured prominently during the discussion, with participants questioning when state funding is used to develop AI systems, including whether this should require open weights and transparent methodologies. The roundtable also explored the potential role for public audit mechanisms in assessing whether AI models genuinely serve last-mile communities and advance public-interest objectives. In addition, the roundtable also emphasised data governance as a foundational pillar of India’s AI ecosystem, calling for responsible data sharing of public and domain-specific data with appropriate safeguards to enable education, research and innovation.
Speakers at the first roundtable included Mishi Chaudhary (Founder), Prasanth Sugathan (Legal Director) and Angela Thomas (Legal Counsel) from SFLC.in; Praveen Chandrahas (Secretary) and Ranjith Raj Vasam (Executive Committee Member) from Swecha; Kiran Chandra (Chief Technology Officer), Gourinath B. Reddy (Chief of Staff), Rajasekhar Ponakala (Senior Engineering Lead), and Dr. Praveen Gorla (Principal Researcher) from VISWAM.ai; Poruri Sai Rahul (Chief Executive Officer) from FOSS United; Sridhar Rao (Director) from The Linux Foundation; Venu Kumar (Data Scientist) from Factly; Ram Iyengar (Security Evangelist) from OpenSSF; Chaitanya Chokkareddy (CTO and Co-founder) from Ozonetel Communications; Prof. Ramesh Loganathan (Professor, Co-Innovation and Outreach) from IIIT Hyderabad; Anoop Kunchukuttan (Co-Founder and Co-Lead) from AI4Bharat; Anwesha Sen (Assistant Programme Manager- Tech and Policy) from Takshashila Institution; Arpita Kanjilal (Head, Research and Communications Division) from Digital Empowerment Foundation, Srinivas Kodali (Independent Researcher) and Prof. Rahul De (Retired Professor) from Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.
The second roundtable focused on questions of compensation, personality rights, and creators and journalistic freedom in the context of generative AI. The speakers largely echoed that the hybrid model proposed by the DPIIT working paper proposes a paternalistic view by taking away a copyright owner’s autonomy without providing them an opt-in /opt-out option to AI training and legitimising data theft in the name of AI innovation. Speakers also raised concerns about the proposed compensation mechanisms, which may prove inadequate and inaccessible to large sections of the public. The discussion also examined risks around misuse, opacity, and concerns related to corruption and accountability in the proposed collective management society models development and deployment.
Speakers at the second roundtable included Prasanth Sugathan (Legal Director) and Angela Thomas (Legal Counsel) from SFLC.in; Kiran Chandra (Chief Technology Officer), Gourinath B. Reddy (Chief of Staff) from VISWAM.ai; Poruri Sai Rahul (Chief Executive Officer) from FOSS United; Sridhar Rao (Director) from The Linux Foundation; Jatin Gandhi (Vice President) from the Press Club of India; Ana Enriquez (Copyright Officer and Head-Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright) from Penn State University Libraries; Ambika Aggarwal from SpicyIP/ Ph.D. (IP Law scholar at NALSAR); Srinivas Kodali (Independent Researcher); Swaraj Barooah (Senior Expert) from SpicyIP; Salauddin (Founder President) from the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union; Merrin Ashraf (Technology Law and Policy Researcher) from IT for Change; Athira P S Nair (Director, Centre for Intellectual Property Rights) from National University of Advanced Legal Studies; Priyanshi Sharma (Co-founder) from Peek TV; Anoop Kunchukuttan (Co-Founder and Co-Lead) from AI4Bharat; Ram Iyengar (Security Evangelist) from OpenSSF; Chaitanya Chokkareddy (CTO and Co-founder) from Ozonetel Communications; Sanjay Kapoor (President) from the Editors Guild of India; Venu Kumar (Data Scientist) from Factly; Ashik Kumar Satheesh (CEO, Ashik Arts; Director and Author).
The dialogue collectively reaffirmed that AI development and deployment are not just technical issues but also social and governance challenges. Participants emphasised the need for frameworks that promote openness, transparency and accountability in shaping AI policies.
VISWAM.AI and SFLC.IN also released a draft of the VISWAM.AI Data Set License for consultation. Various community initiatives for the publication of datasets for public use have gained traction, exemplified by the community model pioneered by VISWAM.AI and Swecha in generating Telugu speech-to-text datasets. Nonetheless, the absence of suitable licensing frameworks presents a risk that these datasets could be appropriated by large organisations without appropriate attribution or reciprocal contribution to the community. The purpose of this new license is to establish a framework that will require any entity utilising a dataset for machine learning or related purposes to abstain from asserting proprietary rights over it and to contribute any modifications or derivations back to the community. The Provider of the Original dataset must be appropriately credited, and any subsequent or modified dataset must be released under the identical license. This framework is grounded in the principles of copyleft licenses applicable to software.
VISWAM.AI and SFLC.IN will be conducting a series of online and in-person consultations to gain feedback on the draft of the license. We invite all stakeholders to use the link (https://discuss.sflc.in/d/SBNXHa9k/swecha-data-sets-license-draft-for-discussion) to submit public comments on the draft License consultation.
Prasanth Sugathan, Legal Director, SFLC.IN said “We need to ensure that the rights of creators are protected and big tech companies do not appropriate the work of individuals and the community without even attributing them. The VISWAM.AI license that we have released for consultation is an attempt to protect the rights of creators so that they are given attribution and users downstream also get the same kind of rights as those given by the creators. ”
The Free and Open Source Software movement has been one of the most successful collaborative efforts in history. However, the licenses that powered this movement like the GPL and Creative Commons, were written for a world of copying and distribution. They were designed to answer: “Can I copy this code?” They were never built to answer: “Can I train a neural network on this culture?
Even in the internet era, “to train or not to train” was a context the pre-AI world never envisaged. We are releasing this Draft License for consultation to ensure proprietary models cannot simply appropriate our work without attribution. This paves the way for the release of community-contributed, crowdsourced datasets under a framework that guarantees community ownership and verifiability,” Said Kiran Chandra, Head and Chief technologist of VISWAM.AI, and the Founder of Swecha.
Through the discussions and release of the draft license, the roundtable reflected its continued commitment to foster multi-stakeholder dialogue and strengthen public interest approaches to AI governance and digital rights in India